Well must close now! Be happy and be good and get on with life! Seize the day all that bollocks. I think that is what Emma would have wanted.
Best wishes (or at a push, love I suppose)
Ian Whitehead
‘Dexter, can you hear me? Oh, God, what have you done? Can you hear me Dex? Open your eyes, will you?’
When he wakes, Sylvie is there. Somehow he is lying on the floor of his flat, jammed between the sofa and the table, and she is standing awkwardly above him, trying to pull him out of the narrow space and get him into a sitting position. His clothes are wet and sticky and he realises that he has been sick in his sleep. He is appalled and ashamed but powerless to move as Sylvie grunts and gasps, her hands beneath his armpits.
‘Oh, Sylvie,’ he says, struggling to help her. ‘I’m sorry. I fucked up again.’
‘Just sit up for me will you, honey?’
‘I’m fucked up, Sylvie. I am so fucked up?.?.?.’
‘You’ll be fine, you need to sleep it off that’s all. Oh, don’t cry, Dexter. Listen to me, will you?’ She’s kneeling with her hands on his face now, looking at him with a tenderness he rarely saw when they were married. ‘We’ll get you cleaned up and into bed, and you can sleep it off. Okay?’
Glancing past her he sees a figure loitering anxiously in the doorway: his daughter. He groans and thinks he might be sick again, so powerful is the sudden spasm of shame.
Sylvie follows his gaze. ‘Jasmine sweetheart, please wait in the other room, will you?’ she says, as levelly as possible. ‘Daddy’s not feeling very well.’ Jasmine doesn’t move. ‘I told you, go next door!’ says Sylvie, panic rising in her voice.
He wants very much to say something to reassure Jasmine, but his mouth is swollen and bruised and he can’t seem to form the words, and instead he lies back down, defeated. ‘Don’t move,’ says Sylvie, ‘Just stay exactly where you are,’ and she leaves the room, taking their daughter with her. He closes his eyes, waiting, praying for all of this to pass. There are voices in the hall. Phone-calls are made.
The next thing that he knows for sure is that he is in the back of a car, curled uncomfortably on the back seat beneath a tartan blanket. He pulls it tight around him – despite the warm day he can’t seem to stop shivering – and realises that it’s the old picnic blanket which, along with the smell of the car’s scuffed burgundy upholstery, reminds him of family days out. With some difficulty he lifts his head to look out of the passenger window. They are on the motorway. Mozart plays on the radio. He sees the back of his father’s head, fine silver-grey hair neatly trimmed apart from the tufts in his ears.
‘Where are we going?’
‘I’m taking you home. Go back to sleep.’
His father has abducted him. For a moment he considers arguing: Take me back to London, I’m fine, I’m not a child. But the leather is warm against his face, he doesn’t have the energy to move, let alone argue. He shivers once more, pulls the blanket up to his chin and falls asleep.
He is woken by the sound of the wheels on the gravel of the large, sturdy family home. ‘In you come then,’ says his father, opening the car door like a chauffeur. ‘Soup for tea!’ and he walks towards the house, tossing the car keys jauntily into the air as he goes. Clearly he has decided to pretend that nothing out of the ordinary has happened, and Dexter is grateful for this. Hunched and unsteady, he clambers from the car, shrugs off the picnic blanket and follows him inside.
In the small downstairs bathroom he inspects his face in the mirror. His bottom lip is cut and swollen, and there’s a large, yellow-brown bruise down one side of his face. He tries to roll his shoulders, but his back aches, the muscles stretched and torn. He winces, then examines his tongue, ulcerous, bitten at the sides and coated with a grey mould. He runs the tip of it over his teeth. They never feel clean these days, and he can smell his own breath reflecting back off the mirror. It has a faecal quality, as if something is decaying inside him. There are broken veins on his nose and cheek. He is drinking with a renewed sense of purpose, nightly and frequently during the day, and has gained a great deal of weight; his face is podgy and slack, his eyes permanently red and rheumy.
He rests his head against the mirror and exhales. In the years he was with Emma he sometimes wondered idly what life would be like if she weren’t around; not in a morbid way, just pragmatically, speculatively, because don’t all lovers do this? Wonder what he would be without her? Now the answer is in the mirror. Loss has not endowed him with any kind of tragic grandeur, it has just made him stupid and banal. Without her he is without merit or virtue or purpose, a shabby, lonely, middle-aged drunk, poisoned with regret and shame. An unwanted memory rises up of that morning, of his own father and his ex-wife undressing him and helping him into the bath. In two weeks time he will be forty-one, and his father is helping him into the bath. Why couldn’t they just have taken him to hospital to have his stomach pumped? There would have been more dignity in that.
In the hallway he can hear his father talking to his sister, shouting into the telephone. He sits on the edge of the bath. It requires no effort to eavesdrop. In fact it’s impossible not to hear.
‘He woke the neighbours, trying to kick his own door down. They let him in?.?.?. Sylvie found him on the floor?.?.?. It seems he had a bit too much to drink that’s all?.?.?. just cuts and bruises?.?.?. Absolutely no idea. Anyway, we’ve cleaned him up. He’ll be fine in the morning. Do you want to come and say hello?’ In the bathroom, Dexter prays for a ‘no’, but his sister clearly can see no pleasure in it either. ‘Fair enough, Cassie. Maybe give him a call in the morning will you?’
When he is sure his father has gone, Dexter steps out into the hall and pads towards the kitchen. He drinks warm tap water from a dusty pint glass and looks out at the garden in the evening sun. The swimming pool is drained and covered with a sagging blue tarpaulin, the tennis court scrappy and overgrown. The kitchen, too, has a musty smell. The large family house has gradually closed down room by room, so that now his father occupies just the kitchen, living room and his bedroom, but even so it is still too large for him. His sister says that sometimes he sleeps on the sofa. Concerned, they have talked to him about moving out, buying somewhere more manageable, a little flat in Oxford or London, but his father won’t hear of it. ‘I intend to die in my own house if you don’t mind,’ he says, a line of argument that’s too emotive to counter.
‘Feeling better then?’ His father stands behind him.
‘A little.’
‘What’s that?’ He nods towards Dexter’s pint glass. ‘Gin, is it?’
‘Just water.’
‘Glad to hear it. I thought we’d have soup tonight, seeing as how it’s a special occasion. Could you manage a tin of soup?’
‘I think so.’
He holds two tins in the air. ‘Mulligatawny or Cream of Chicken?’
So the two men shuffle around the large musty kitchen, a pair of widowers making more mess than is really necessary in warming two cans of soup. Since living alone, his father’s diet has reverted to that of an ambitious boy-scout: baked beans, sausages, fish-fingers; he has even been known to make himself a saucepan of jelly.
The phone rings in the hall. ‘Get that will you?’ says his father, mashing butter onto sliced white bread. Dexter hesitates. ‘It won’t bite you, Dexter.’
He goes into the hall and picks up. It’s Sylvie. Dexter settles on the stairs. His ex-wife lives alone now, the relationship with Callum having finally combusted just before Christmas time. Their mutual unhappiness, and a desire to protect Jasmine from this, has made them strangely close and for the first time since they got married they are almost friends.
‘How are you feeling?’
‘Oh, you know. Bit embarrassed. Sorry about that.’
‘That’s alright.’
‘I seem to remember you and Dad putting me in the bath.’
Sylvie laughs. ‘He was very unfazed by it all. “He’s got nothing I’ve not seen before!”’
Dexter smiles and winces at the same time. ‘Is Jasmine okay?’
‘I think so. She’s fine. She will be fine. I told her you had food poisoning.’
‘I’ll make it up to her. Like I said, I’m sorry.’
‘These things happen. Just don’t ever, ever do it again, will you?’
Dexter makes a noise that sounds like ‘No, well, we’ll see?.?.?.’ There is a silence. ‘I should go, Sylvie. Soup’s burning.’
‘See you Saturday night, yes?’
‘See you then. Love to Jasmine. And I’m sorry.’
He hears her adjust the receiver. ‘We do all love you, Dexter.’
‘No reason why you should,’ he mumbles, embarrassed.
‘No, maybe not. But we do.’
After a moment, he replaces the phone then joins his father in front of the television, drinking lemon barley water that has been diluted in homeopathic proportions. The soup is eaten off trays with specially padded undersides for comfortable laptop eating – a recent innovation that Dexter finds vaguely depressing, perhaps because it’s the kind of thing his mother would have never let in the house. The soup itself is as hot as lava, stinging his cut lip as he sips it, and the sliced white bread his father buys is imperfectly buttered, torn and mashed into a puttycoloured pulp. But it is, bizarrely, delicious, the thick butter melting into the sticky soup, and they eat it while watching EastEnders, another recent compulsion of his father’s. As the credits roll, he places the padded tray on the floor, presses the mute button on the remote control and turns to look at Dexter.
‘So is this to become an annual festival, do you think?’
‘I don’t know yet.’ Some time passes, and his father turns back to the muted TV. ‘I’m sorry,’ says Dexter.
‘What for?’
‘Well, you had to put me in the bath, so?.?.?.’
‘Yes I’d rather not do that again if you don’t mind.’ With the TV still muted, he starts to flick through the TV channels. ‘Anyway, you’ll be doing it for me soon enough.’
‘God, I hope not,’ says Dexter. ‘Can’t Cassie do it?’
His father smiles and glances back at him. ‘I really don’t want to have a heart-to-heart. Do you?’
‘I’d rather not.’
‘Well let’s not then. Let’s just say that I think the best thing you could do is try and live your life as if Emma were still here. Don’t you think that would be best?’
‘I don’t know if I can.’
‘Well you’ll have to try.’ He reaches for the remote control. ‘What do you think I’ve been doing for the last ten years?’ On the TV, his father finds what he has been looking for, and sinks further into his chair. ‘Ah, The Bill.’
They sit and watch the TV in the light of the summer evening, in the room full of family photographs and to his embarrassment Dexter finds that he is crying once again, very quietly. Discreetly, he puts his hand to his eyes, but his father can hear the catching of his breath and glances over.
‘Everything alright there?’
‘Sorry,’ says Dexter.
‘Not my cooking, is it?’
Dexter laughs and sniffs. ‘Still a bit drunk, I think.’
‘It’s alright,’ says his father, turning back to the TV. ‘Silent Witness is on at nine.’
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Arthur’s Seat
SATURDAY 15 JULY 1988
Rankeillor Street, Edinburgh
Dexter showered in the shabby mildewed bathroom, then put on last night’s shirt. It smelt of sweat and cigarettes so he put the suit jacket on too, to hold the odour in, then squeezed toothpaste onto his index finger and polished his teeth.
He joined Emma Morley and Tilly Killick in the kitchen, beneath a greasy wall-sized poster of Truffaut’s Jules et Jim. Jeanne Moreau stood over them laughing as they ate an awkward, bowel-tweaking breakfast: brown toast with soya spread, some kind of aggregate muesli. Because this was a special occasion, Emma had washed out the continental-style espresso maker, the kind that always seemed to be mouldy inside, and after the first cup of oily black liquid Dexter began to feel a little bit better. He sat quietly, listening to the flatmates’ self-consciously larky banter, their big spectacles worn as a badge of honour, and had the vague feeling that he had been taken hostage by a rogue fringe theatre company. Perhaps it had been a mistake to stay on after all. Certainly it had been a mistake to leave the bedroom. How was he supposed to kiss her with Tilly Killick sitting there, babbling on?
For her part, Emma found herself increasingly maddened by Tilly’s presence. Did she have no discretion at all? Sat there with her chin cupped in her hand, playing with her hair and sucking her teaspoon. Emma had made the mistake of showering with an untested bottle of Body Shop strawberry gel and was painfully aware of smelling like a fruit yoghurt. She badly wanted to go and rinse it off, but didn’t dare leave Dexter alone with Tilly, her dressing-gown gaping open on her best underwear, a red plaid all-in-one body from Knickerbox; she could be so obvious sometimes.
To go back to bed, that’s what Emma really wanted, and to be partially dressed once again, but it was too late for that now, they were all too sober. Keen to get away, she wondered aloud what they should do today, the first day of their graduate lives.
‘We could go to the pub?’ suggested Dexter, weakly. Emma groaned with nausea.
‘Go for lunch?’ said Tilly.
‘No money.’
‘The movies then?’ offered Dexter. ‘I’ll pay?.?.?.’
‘Not today. It’s lovely out, we should be outside.’
‘Okay, the beach, North Berwick.’
Emma shrank from the idea. It would mean wearing a swimming costume in front of him, and she wasn’t strong enough for that kind of agony. ‘I’m useless on the beach.’
‘Okay then, what?’
‘We could climb up Arthur’s Seat?’ said Tilly.
‘Never done it,’ said Dexter casually. Both girls looked at him, open-mouthed.
‘You’ve never climbed Arthur’s Seat?’
‘Nope.’
‘You’ve been in Edinburgh four years, and you’ve never .?.?.’
‘I’ve been busy!’
‘Doing what?’ said Tilly.
‘Studying anthropology,’ said Emma and the two girls cackled unkindly.
‘Well we must go!’ said Tilly, and a brief silence followed as Emma’s eyes blazed a warning.
‘I haven’t got proper shoes,’ said Dexter.
‘It’s not K2, it’s just a big hill.’
‘I can’t climb it in brogues!’
‘You’ll be fine, it’s not hard.’
‘In my suit?’
‘Yes! We could take a picnic!’ But Emma could feel the enthusiasm starting to slip away, until Tilly finally spoke:
‘Actually, you two should probably go without me. I’ve got?.?.?. stuff to do.’
Emma’s eyes flicked towards her, catching the end of a wink, and Emma thought she might very easily lean across and kiss her.
‘Alright then. Let’s do it!’ said Dexter, brightening too, and fifteen minutes later they were stepping outside into the hazy July morning, the Salisbury Crags looming over them at the end of Rankeillor Street.
‘We’re really climbing up there?’
‘A child could do it. Trust me.’
