The Whole Day Through (3 page)

Time to be up. He pulled on his dressing gown and crossed the landing to the bathroom. Bobby was in there, showering, however, which was odd because he always let Ben go in first – it was their established routine as Ben
was quicker – and because he hadn’t bolted the bathroom door, which was completely out of character.

‘Sorry,’ Ben called, shutting the door in a hurry. He was sure he had heard him moving around in his room still. But perhaps that was just the radio or noise from the street through an open window. He returned to his room to wait.

He lay down again at first but then worried he might drift back to sleep so he sat on the edge of the bed, put on his reading glasses and caught up with an article on syphilis figures in the under-twenty-fives he had been meaning to read for weeks. He was barely past the opening digest, which was so poorly punctuated he had to read it twice to wring the sense from it, when he heard doors open and close again and hurried out to claim his turn in the shower. His dressing gown fell open disobligingly as he shaved and he felt afresh the unfairness that one’s body in dreams seemed to stop ageing at around its twenty-five-year perfection.

The smell of toast and coffee wound up the narrow stairs to greet him. Halfway down he called out, ‘You’re up bright and early.’

Only it wasn’t Bobby at the kitchen table but a stranger about his own age with very black hair, a tattoo and a boxer’s nose. He seemed as startled as Ben and slopped his coffee on yesterday’s paper. He was what Chloë, with her fearless snobbery, would have called a
Lock-Up-Your-Silver
but there was nothing worth stealing except Ben’s car and Bobby’s racing bike and Ben saw
at a glance that the keys to both house and car were still on their hook and the precious bike was still visible outside the window in their (unimproved) backyard.

‘Who the hell are you?’ Ben asked without thinking. ‘Sorry. I…You startled me. I thought you were Bobby.’

‘Mikey,’ said the man. ‘Mate of Bobby’s. Are you Bobby’s…?’

‘Brother.’

‘Brother. Oh. That’s okay, then.’ He was Irish. He shook Ben’s proffered hand uncertainly. Upstairs, doors opened and closed, the lavatory was vigorously used then they heard Bobby’s usual tuneless singing from the shower.

‘Somebody’s happy,’ Ben said, pouring himself coffee. ‘Have you known Bob long?’

‘Yeah,’ Mikey said, adding after a pause, ‘no. No, actually. He was a Gaydar thing. Look, I’ve gotta go. Can you tell him I said bye?’

‘Sure.’

Mikey stood, tipped the last of his coffee into the sink. ‘No rest for the wicked, eh?’ he said. ‘See you.’

‘Yeah. Bye.’

He was plainly left nervous by the encounter as he had trouble opening the front door.

‘Press the bottom with your foot as you pull,’ Ben called out. ‘It’s a bit warped.’

The man was released and let himself out with panicky thanks.

Ben fixed himself a bowl of muesli, chopped a banana into it and pondered, as his work constantly invited him
to, the vagaries of human innocence. It was a recurrent weakness in the relatives of adults with Down’s Syndrome that they preferred not to credit their loved one with a sex drive and were quite capable of treating them as a kind of galumphing child, brimming with love, yes, but only of the nice, innocent kind, like a puppy’s, not a man’s. Only three weeks ago he had been obliged to explain to a family at his clinic that their little girl, a twenty-five-year-old who had Down’s Syndrome, collected biker jackets and was a big fan of Joan Jett and the Blackhearts, was not only HIV positive but had become so through gleeful and repeated unprotected sexual contact.

Bobby didn’t have the form of Down’s Syndrome everyone thought they knew about. He was one of the rare, arguably luckier ones with the Mosaic variant. In this, through some glitch, not every cell line in his developing zygote had acquired the extra, twenty-first chromosome. (Aged twelve or so, his already biology-mad big brother had made himself an expert in the subject and submitted a project on DNA as part of his scholarship application to Winchester.) Bobby had faced developmental setbacks. He proved slow to walk and was extremely slow to speak. His speech now was mumbling, especially so with strangers. With people he liked, confidence made him positively chatty if not always intelligible. He was shorter than average, had stumpy fingers, was prone to weight gain and had a weak heart. He was more likely to develop leukaemia
and had an above-average chance of developing early-onset Alzheimer’s. But his looks were unusual rather than characteristic; his tongue was not overly large, his nose and ears not overly small. He had only very slight epicanthic folds to his eyes and from some distant relation he had a shock of white-blonde hair and eyes that really were the colour of cornflowers. As a toddler he had pulled people up short in the street. As an adult, he resembled a young, Chinese-influenced Truman Capote.

And now, at thirty-eight, he finally had a sex life.

For all her furious drive to see that he caught up with his peers as best he could and received a ‘normal’ education in a city state school, with all the rough and tumble that entailed, their mother had fought shy of making Bobby independent. She loved him too much to let him go and convinced herself he had a better chance of a dignified life at home with her than by taking up the offer of a flat in a purpose-built complex with a warden. And, in truth, Bobby loved her too much to leave even had she encouraged him. They had an intense, battling intimacy – a kind of marriage – that precluded the need for any relationship beyond the home. She returned to teaching, he found the first of a series of undemanding jobs and they continued to be all-in-all to one another until she died. Her death plunged Bobby into such a deep depression that he needed full-time care for a month or two. But it was as though that breakdown had cracked a maternal shell and at last the properly adult Bobby was emerging.

Bobby came down the stairs two at a time. He was fighting with his tie as usual, and as usual Ben had to fight the urge to help him with it. Scorning to wear the ugly synthetic one that was issued by the station management, Bobby had an extravagant collection – one for every working day in the month – and liked to tie them in a Windsor knot worthy of a footballer, but the tying of the knot was a challenge. Shoelaces had always defeated him and he had worn loafers or Velcro-fastened trainers since the fifth form, but he would never accept defeat from a tie.

‘You just missed your conquest,’ Ben told him and Bobby blushed and turned aside to tear open a bag of the day-old pastries he brought home from work.

‘I said he had to clear off straight after his shower,’ he mumbled.

‘Yes, well, I think he got hungry on the way. Tea?’

‘Yeah.’

Ben filled him a mug. Bobby had to serve coffees all day in the station shop and the smell of the drink now sickened him.

‘Have you known him long?’

‘No. We met on Gaydar. He was minging, wasn’t he?’

‘Well. I couldn’t say.’

‘I only meant to have a drink really.’ Bobby turned, munching a stale croissant. ‘It was a pity fuck.’ He swore colourfully as he showered himself with crumbs.

‘The term is mercy fuck,’ Ben told him, trying not to offend him by laughing.

‘Whatever. It’s hard to say no,’ he said, brushing himself clean.

‘Hmm. He said to say bye, anyway.’

‘Huh.’

‘Heartbreaker.’

‘Shut up! He didn’t nick any of our stuff, did he?’

‘No. Bobs, you were careful, weren’t you?’

‘Yes.’

‘Condoms and stuff.’

‘
Yes
,’ Bobby growled impatiently and sipped his tea. ‘No sex without socks. I’m not a kid.’ He tugged back a chair and sat down, slopping his tea, then peeled and ate a banana.

‘You’re going to be late,’ Ben said, glancing at the clock.

‘It’s fine. Ben?’

‘What?’

Bobby scratched himself below the table. ‘I think I need to come to your clinic thing.’

‘Why? Do you want me to take a look at you?’

‘No way!’ Bobby was horrified.

‘I thought you were careful.’

‘I
was
.’

‘So, what? Have you got a discharge?’

‘Eurggh! No!’

‘Soreness?’

Bobby shook his head but he scratched again with the hand that wasn’t feeding himself banana.

‘Do you itch?’ Ben asked.

Bobby nodded. ‘Started this morning,’ he said.

Ben grinned. ‘It’s crabs, Bob. Pubic lice.’

‘It’s
really
itchy, though!’

‘And it’ll get worse, front and back, if you don’t sort it. Here.’ Ben grabbed one of the free pads they were forever being given by drugs companies and a rival company’s pen. ‘Go to a chemist on your way to work – that one by the lights’ll be open – and ask for a bottle of this. Then you need to go to the Gents and dab it on with loo paper everywhere you itch. Everywhere you’ve got hair.’

‘On my head?’

‘Does it itch on your head?’

‘No.’

‘Fine. Just your pubic hair. Front and back. It burns a bit but it works really fast. We’ll need your sheets given a hot wash too.’

‘I’ve not got time.’

‘I’ll do them. I’m not on till nine-thirty.’

‘Oh. Okay. Thanks, Ben.’

‘Stop scratching. Eat some toast.’

‘No time.’ Bobby lurched up and tossed the banana skin into the bin.

‘Will I see you tonight?’

‘Yeah. It’s Shirley’s thing then I’ve got a hot date.’

‘Another one? Bobby!’

‘Not Gaydar. Proper date. With a meal and everything.’

‘Who with?’

‘He’s a train driver. He’s lovely.’

‘Oh. Well, we’d better get your little friends sorted.’

‘Yeah. Shit. Gotta go.’

‘Teeth brushed?’

‘Do ’em at work.’

‘Phone.’

‘Yes. Keys! Yes!’ Bobby was halfway to his bike. He stopped, hit his pockets, grinned. ‘No.’

Ben picked them off the television and passed them to him.

‘I’m not a kid,’ Bobby told him.

‘You certainly aren’t, Master Robert. Go on. Go. Buy that stuff.’

Ben cleared away the breakfast things and went in search of Bobby’s sheets. He might be an adult now but he still slept in his boyhood single, watched over by a picture of their mother.

It was a lovely image, entirely spontaneous, snapped by some colleague at her fiftieth birthday party. As a surprise, a gang of friends had taken her and the boys out on the Kennet and Avon Canal for the day. They’d provided a picnic and champagne and even a cake with fifty candles: a day of extravagant pleasure, judged by her careful standards. In the picture she had been persuaded to pose on the boat’s roof with her legs dangling – which couldn’t have been easy, although she had excellent, if neglected, legs, because she hated being photographed. Just as the shutter was about to click, Bobby had hugged her legs to press a loving kiss on one
of her knees. Startled and touched in equal measure, she was laughing at the camera and running a hand through Bobby’s snowy hair. She had been so stoical always, so often overburdened and exhausted, never less than loving but often too tired to express it, that it was a delight to see her tricked into revealing this lighter side. Ben too had a copy of the picture somewhere, and they had reproduced it on the order of service for her funeral, but he could never examine it without wondering how differently she might have aged if Bobby had not been born or had been no less healthy, no more demanding than other children. Their father might still have left her and she would have been the same woman, of course, but the emphasis in her character, the distribution of light and shadow, might have been quite different.

Her picture wasn’t the only icon above Bobby’s bed. His sleep was also watched over by several pin-ups of George Clooney and Tommy Lee Jones and, inexplicably, a ragged magazine clipping of Barbara Castle. Ben didn’t snoop but he spotted a couple of discarded condom foils as he stripped the bed, and he was reassured.

The phone rang as he was loading the washing machine and he ignored it, letting his mother’s seemingly indestructible old tape-based answering machine take the call. He heard his outgoing message, which Bobby said made them sound like a gay couple short of a social life, and then his wife’s voice.

‘Oh. Blast. Hello, boys, it’s just Chloë. Ben, are you there still? I just wanted a chat about things…’

He froze, staring down at the answering machine. He could hear Chloë breathing and the click of her car keys as she bounced them nervously in her palm.

‘Oh well…’ she said. ‘I’ll try your mobile again. Bye, both.’

He snatched up the phone. ‘Chloë.’

‘Oh. You are there.’

‘Yes. Hi. Sorry. I was just heading out to work.’

‘Well, I’ll call back on the mobile then you can talk and walk.’

‘No. I’ll call you. Just give me five minutes to brush teeth and stuff or I’ll be late.’

‘But will you? Last time you –’

‘Yes, yes. I’ll call. Promise. Five minutes.’ He hung up and realized his heart was racing.

If only she had become a monster, it would be so much easier. Weirdly, however, she had been far closer to monstrous when he was first in love with her. When they first met, her values were all awry, she was laughably vain and full of politically unsound received opinions dressed up as pretty ignorance. But physically she was perfection, with flawless skin, a cascade of tawny blonde hair, big grey eyes that spoke at once of sorrow and invitation. She was the same age as the other girls in her year but was so groomed and poised by comparison, so careful, that she had all the charisma of an older woman with none of experience’s taint.

It was a secret relief to discover she wasn’t both a model
and
an intellectual. Ben was such a tunnel
visioned scientist at this stage that all the humanities students seemed clever to him because they were cultured and studied the sort of things that enlivened conversation rather than the reverse. Chloë was no exception – reading French – and it was only after a few conversations that he realized she had only made it into Oxford by virtue of the efficient cramming methods at her boarding school, not from any originality of thought or even hunger to learn. Off the leash from her schoolmistresses, she had been mentally dawdling since her first-year exams, shamelessly pillaging swottier students’ notes and essays, and would be lucky if she scraped a third.