Collected Stories (74 page)

However, Rick feels strange, as if he has been asleep for some time. He wants to tell Anna what happened to him while he was asleep. He finds some furniture to hold on to, and pulls himself up.

He sees Daniel running around with a glass of wine in his hand.

‘What’s been going on?’ Anna says.

‘We went out,’ Rick says, pursuing the boy and retrieving the glass. ‘Didn’t we, Dan?’

‘Out with Dadda,’ says Daniel. ‘Nice time and biscuits. Dadda have drink.’

‘Thanks, Dan,’ Rick says.

Rick notices he has removed Daniel’s trousers and nappy but omitted to replace them. There is a puddle on the floor and Daniel has wet his socks; his vest, which is hanging down, is soaked too.

He says to her, ‘You think I was asleep, but I wasn’t. I was thinking, or dreaming, rather. Yes, constructively dreaming …’

‘And you expect me to ask what about?’

‘I had an idea,’ he says. ‘It was my forty-fifth birthday yesterday and a good time we had too. I was dreaming that we were writing a card to Dan for his forty-fifth birthday. A card he wouldn’t be allowed to open until then.’

‘I see,’ she says, sitting down. Dan is playing at her feet.

‘After all,’ he continues, ‘like you I think about the past more and more. I think of my parents, of being a child, of my brothers, the house, all of it. What we’ll do is write him a card, and you can illustrate it. We’ll make it now, put it away and forget it. Years will pass and one day, when Dan’s forty-five with grey hair and a bad knee, he’ll remember it, and open it. We’ll have sent him our love from the afterlife. Of course, you’ll be alive then, but it’s unlikely that I will be. For those moments, though, when he’s reading it, I’ll be vital in his mind. What d’you say, Anna? I’d love to have received a card from my parents on my forty-fifth birthday. All day I thought one would just pop through the door, you know.’

He is aware that she has been drinking, too, after her class. Now, as always, she begins to spread her drawings of heads, torsos and hands out on the floor. Daniel ambles across the big sheets as Rick examines them, trying to find words of praise he hasn’t used before. She is hoping to sell some of her work eventually, to supplement their income.

She says, ‘A card’s great. It’s a good idea and a sweet, generous gesture. But it’s not enough.’

‘What d’you mean?’ he says. He goes on, ‘You might be right. When I was dreaming, I kept thinking of the last scene of
Wild
Strawberries
.’

‘What happens in it?’

‘Doesn’t the old man, on a last journey to meet the significant figures of his life, finally wave to his parents?’

‘That’s what we should do,’ she says. ‘Make a video for Daniel and put it in a sealed envelope.’

‘Yes,’ he says, drinking from a glass he finds beside the chair. ‘It’s a brilliant idea.’

‘But we’re quite drunk,’ she says. ‘It’ll be him sitting in front of it, forty-five years old. He’ll turn on the tape at last and –’

‘There won’t even be tapes then,’ Rick says. ‘They’ll be in a museum. But they’ll be able to convert it to whatever system they have.’

She says, ‘My point is, after all that time, he’ll see two pissed people. What’s his therapist going to say?’

‘Don’t we want him to know that you and I had a good time sometimes?’

‘Okay,’ she says. ‘But if we’re going to do this, we should be prepared.’

‘Good,’ he says. ‘We could …’

‘What?’

‘Put on white shirts. Does my hair look too flat?’

‘We look okay,’ she says. ‘Well, I do, and you don’t care. But we should think about what we’re going to say. This tape might be a big thing for little Dan. Imagine if your father was to speak to you right now.’

‘You’re right,’ he says. His own father had killed himself almost ten years ago. ‘Anna, what would you like to say to Dan?’

‘There’s so much … really, I don’t know yet.’

‘Also, we’ve got to be careful how we talk to him,’ he says. ‘He’s not two years old in this scenario. He’s my age. We can’t use baby voices or call him Dan-the-Noddy-man.’

They dispute about what exactly the message should be, what a parent might say to their forty-five-year-old son, now only two and a half, sitting there on the floor singing ‘Incy Wincy Spider’ to himself. Of course there can be no end to this deliberation: whether they should give Daniel a good dose of advice and encouragement, or a few memories, or a mixture of all three. They do at least decide that since they’re getting tired and fretful they should set up the camera.

While she goes into the cellar to find it, he makes Daniel’s milk, gets him into his blue pyjamas with the white trim, and chases him around the kitchen with a wet cloth. She drags the camera and tripod up into the living room.

Although they haven’t decided what to say, they will go ahead with the filming certain that something will occur to them. This spontaneity may make their little dispatch to the future seem less portentous.

Rick lugs the Christmas tree over towards the sofa where they will sit for the message, and turns on the lights. He regards his wife through the camera. She has let down her hair.

‘How splendid you look!’

She asks, ‘Should I take my slippers off?’

‘Anna, your fluffies won’t be immortalised. I’ll frame it down to our waists.’

She gets up and looks at him through the eye piece, telling him he’s as fine as he’ll ever be. He switches on the camera and notices there is only about fifteen minutes’ worth of tape left.

With the camera running, he hurries towards the sofa, being careful not to trip up. They will not be able to do this twice. Noticing a half-eaten sardine on the arm of the sofa, he drops it into his pocket.

Rick sits down knowing this will be a sombre business, for he has been, in a sense, already dead for a while. Daniel’s idea of him will have been developing for a long time. The two of them will have fallen out on numerous occasions; Daniel might love him but will have disliked him, too, in the normal way. Daniel could hardly have anything but a complicated idea of his past, but these words from eternity will serve as a simple reminder. After all, it is the unloved who are the most dangerous people on this earth.

The light on top of the camera is flashing. As Anna and Rick turn their heads and look into the dark moon of the lens, neither of them speaks for what seems a long time. At last, Rick says, ‘Hello there,’ rather self-consciously, as though meeting a stranger for the first time. On stage he is never anxious like this. Anna, also at a loss, copies him.

‘Hello, Daniel, my son,’ she says. ‘It’s your mummy.’

‘And daddy,’ Rick says.

‘Yes,’ she says. ‘Here we are!’

‘Your parents,’ he says. ‘Remember us? Do you remember this day?’

There is a silence; they wonder what to do.

Anna turns to Rick then, placing her hands on his face. She strokes his face as if painting it for the camera. She takes his hand and puts his fingers to her lips and cheeks. Rick leans over and takes her head between his hands and kisses her on the cheek and on the forehead and on the lips, and she caresses his hair and pulls him to her.

With their heads together, they begin to call out, ‘Hello, Dan, we hope you’re okay, we just wanted to say hello.’

‘Yes, that’s right,’ chips in the other. ‘Hello!’

‘We hope you had a good forty-fifth birthday, Dan, with plenty of presents.’

‘Yes, and we hope you’re well, and your wife, or whoever it is you’re with.’

‘Yes, hello there … wife of Dan.’

‘And children of Dan,’ she adds.

‘Yes,’ he says. ‘Children of Dan – however many of you there are, boys or girls or whatever – all the best! A good life to every single one of you!’

‘Yes, yes!’ she says. ‘All of that and more!’

‘More, more, more!’ Rick says.

After the kissing and stroking and cuddling and saying hello, and with a little time left, they are at a loss as to what to do, but right on cue Daniel has an idea. He clambers up from the floor and settles himself on both of them, and they kiss him and pass him between them and get him to wave to himself. When he has done this, he closes his eyes, his head falls into the crook of his mother’s arm, and he smacks his lips; and as the tape whirls towards its end, and the rain falls outside and time passes, they want him to be sure at least of this one thing, more than forty years from now, when he looks at these old-fashioned people in the past sitting on the sofa next to the Christmas tree, that on this night they loved him and they loved each other.

‘Goodbye, Daniel,’ says Anna.

‘Goodbye,’ says Rick.

‘Goodbye, goodbye,’ they say together.

It was true: Mal couldn’t bear his son Wallace and dreaded seeing him now. What natural feeling was there between them? They were bewildered strangers who didn’t know what to say or do together.

Today, Mal was to take the nine-year-old away for the night.

‘We can spend time hanging out,’ explained Mal again. ‘We can talk – about anything you want.’

‘I’d rather go to hell,’ Wallace said. ‘I’d rather be dead than go anywhere with you!’ Loudly he whispered, ‘Fucker!’

Wallace had arrived at the house the previous evening. Normally, he stayed the weekend, but Mal was glad to be taking him home tomorrow, after their trip, as he was required at a party. Nevertheless, since he’d woken up, Wallace had been sobbing and complaining on the stairs. It was nearly lunch time; the taxi was waiting outside.

‘We’re only going to the seaside.’

‘For the night!’

Mal explained, ‘I’ve already said that will be nicer for us, rather than rushing back on the last train.’

‘Nice for you, torture for me!’

‘For me, too, it looks like.’

Wallace was not only what was commonly described as an ‘accident’, there had been no necessity for his birth at all. How could he not have sensed that?

Mal’s wife came over to them. She was accompanied by their four-year-old, who tried to stroke his hysterical half-brother’s swollen, tear-riven face.

‘Don’t cry, Wally,’ he said.

They were all looking at Wallace. His
Beano
shirt (‘Look, I’m an advertisement!’) was covered with chocolate stains: Wallace used it as a napkin. When he ate, he still spilled his food, and always knocked over his drinks. This was partly because he refused to sit at the table, but ranged about the house looking for things to break and turning the TV off and on. His trousers had a hole where he’d fallen but his trainers were top-of-the-range, with lights in the heel that flashed when he kicked an adult. What annoyed Mal was not his son’s resemblance to his mother – the boy turned his head and suddenly Mal was reminded of his eternal connection to a stranger, as if this were a black joke – but to the boy’s stepfather, who Wallace called ‘Dad’ and Mal ‘The Beast’.

Mal said, ‘Wallace, we do really have to leave – otherwise we’ll miss the train.’ Wallace opened his chocolate-filled mouth. Mal reached out to pull him. ‘Get in the bloody taxi now!’

Wallace sprang back, spitting chocolate over Mal’s white shirt. ‘If you hurt me, I will kill myself.’ He stood up and punched himself in the stomach. ‘I will now go and fix my hair.’

Mal was glad of the chance to kiss his youngest son and his wife, who attempted to wipe him down. ‘Mal, don’t get furious. Try and have a good time with him. Try to talk.’

‘Talk!’

‘Have you been drinking already?’

‘Just the one. I’m petrified he’ll do something lunatic during the meeting this afternoon. I wish you would look after him today.’

‘I am not yet a saint. I’ll have coffee with the girls and we’ll laugh about this.’

The boy emerged from the bathroom with his mass of hair – which Mal maintained would one day have to be removed surgically, under anaesthetic – slicked down with water. Mal noticed he had added perfumed hair gel, which sat on his head in lumps, mingling, no doubt, with his nits.

Mal took their luggage out to the car. Wallace had no choice but to follow, carrying a plastic bag which contained drinks, his Gameboy, pens, and many half-eaten Easter eggs.

In the back of the car, Mal stroked him. ‘Come on. No one’s going to love you if you behave like this. You need charm to get by in this world.’

The boy put his hands over his face as the taxi pulled away. He was wearing the goalkeeping gloves he refused to be parted from.

‘Don’t ever touch me. Or point at me. Don’t do anything bad to me, you bastard.’

Mal noticed the driver’s wide eyes watching them in the mirror. Clearly, he was from a country with stricter notions of how children should behave.

‘For Christ’s sake, shhh …’

They were on their way to see Andrea Knowles, a young film director, who was considering using Mal as editor on her first feature film. It was a job he needed badly; it would be a significant step up. Inevitably, Wallace’s mother had refused to alter their arrangement. Mal had tried to leave Wallace with his wife, but Wallace had taken to calling her a bitch and had kicked her.

Mal and Wallace’s mother had had a ‘fling’ ten years ago, lasting a few weeks. By the time Wallace was born, they had returned to their separate lives. All Mal wanted was for her to disappear into the mulch of the past. Somehow she had become pregnant and refused a termination.