Subjects, page 13
‘Amazing,’ said Hugo. ‘Like the Mona Lisa on amphetamines.’
‘I gave him the idea,’ said Tim. He had completely forgotten that today was the day.
‘This is from Tim and that’s from me,’ said Florence, saving him. She handed Hugo a carefully wrapped book and DVD.
‘Oh, Tim,’ said Hugo, stroking the commemorative Pratchett. ‘That’s fantastic. Thank you. My absolute favourite. I’ll enjoy reading that again.’ He had at least three copies but not a gilded hardback one like that. ‘I hope you didn’t spend a whole heap of pocket money on it.’
Tim gave Florence an urgent look. He would pay her back.
‘And what’s this?’ Hugo chuckled as he tore the paper off a DVD of Breaking Bad. ‘Is this entirely suitable, Flo? I hope your chemistry teachers aren’t doing a side line in crystal meth.’
‘It’s morally justified. He does it to save his family from distress.’
She knew he’d love it and almost certainly let her watch it with him, studiously failing to notice it was certified eighteen.
Sofia left the room, returning with an enormous package she had clumsily wrapped the night before. They were playing with the remains of the eyeballs and the liquorice glasses, holding them against their eye sockets and jiggling their heads from side to side, as she came back in. She put it onto the table right in front of him.
‘Oh, thank you, darling.’ He stopped laughing, put the eyeballs down and wiped his sticky hands on his trousers, reaching over to plant an appreciative kiss upon her cheek.
‘It’s just a little something – practical. I wasn’t sure what to get.’
He made a systematic start on finding entry to the Sellotape-swaddled package. It went quiet, as the laughter fell away with the wrapping paper.
A holdall.
Not monogrammed. Not expensive. Plastic wheels along the bottom. No ball-bearings. Khaki, not unlike the bag he’d given her.
He raised his eyebrows in surprise and gratification. ‘Oh, that’s great, darling. That’s-that’s really smart.’
‘It’s a smaller one, to fit better when you’re on the plane.’
He was looking inside to investigate the inner compartments. She recalled now with a sinking feeling the reason why he always took his saggy briefcase as hand luggage, banishing his holdall to the cargo hold. Whilst the leather was exhausted – wrinkled and patchy with use – it was still more resilient than a cloth-based bag, with its three stiff compartments for keeping papers back to back, and was eccentrically recognisable on the baggage reclaim rack.
‘No, that’s great, Sofs. The one I had was much too big, really. Yeah, I think I can flatten out my papers on the bottom bit – that’s quite hard.’
It wasn’t. It was supported by a thinnish sheet of plastic.
‘Sorry, it’s probably not actually what you—’
‘It’s great, Sofs, really useful. I’ll take it with me next trip.’
‘Mum, what’s that smell?’ Isaac was scrunching his nose up.
She jumped around and pulled the burning pie out from the top shelf of the oven. She must have overturned the dial instead of switching it off. She placed it, smoking, by the remains of the cake.
‘It’ll be all right, Mum,’ Florence said, picking the black edges off in two long brittle curves. ‘You’ll never taste it with the gravy and the mash.’ The runner beans in the steamer were limp now, crumpled in the bottom like dead soldiers in a trench.
Sofia served everything up, and they ate obediently, industriously enjoying it. There wasn’t any pudding now that they had had the cake.
‘You haven’t opened your cards, Dad,’ said Isaac, ‘except the ones from us. There might be money inside.’ His own often contained the disappointment of book tokens or cheques.
Hugo used his thumb to unseal the five envelopes on the table. Cards from his mother, Sofia’s parents, his two sisters and Mark from university.
‘Well, thank you, everybody, for all the lovely stuff. I’m honoured and touched and will now retire happily full of monster flesh and chicken pie.’
‘What’s retire?’ said Isaac.
‘I must return to my abode, young humanoid. I have a mission to complete.’
‘Can’t you stay downstairs with us?’
‘I can’t, but I can transport you at the speed of light to bed.’
Singlehandedly impersonating all the aspects of a major rocket launch, he counted down, whirled and lunged around the kitchen table and scooped them up again, dragging them delightedly back up the stairs.
Florence was already gathering up the dirty plates. Looking for something to do, Sofia picked up all the wrapping paper, and the torn envelopes, and opened up the back door to put them in the bin. It was already almost filled right to the brim with crushed cardboard box files, old journals, draft conference papers and discarded manuals. He’d had to have a clear-out to find an abstract from a paper he’d written years ago, as part of preparations for his latest trip.
As the security light flipped on, she noticed a bright blue C5 envelope sticking out from the side of the pile, caught by just one corner, bending down as if just about to jump onto the gravel. She knew the writing on it, intimately, but for a moment couldn’t place it, couldn’t link it to a relative or a friend. Sofia slid it out and scrutinised it for a moment. Then she dropped it with sickened recognition back onto the heap.
It was her hand. The hand that wrote with such assured affection, such tender dependency, such impassioned desperation in the letters she had found. Now sending him birthday wishes he did not want Sofia to see.
Had they been in touch all this time?
Staring at the postmark, she tried to make sense of it. Maybe she wrote to him every birthday. Sofia would have sent a goodwill card to Jim, after all, if they’d been civilized enough to keep each other’s details afterwards. It wasn’t a birthday card though. The postmark was much earlier – 12 February.
No wonder he had buried it in an earlier layer of paper sediment.
She pushed it back where it had come from, stuffed the evening’s crumpled wrapping paper onto the top and calmly, forcefully, pushed down the lid.
Fifteen
Friday, 11 March 2016
They sat on either side of the two roll mats, in furious stalemate.
‘Tim, it’s on my compulsory kit list. You’ll be on camp beds half the time.’
‘We won’t. Akela said we’ll go outside if there’s no frost.’
‘I need it, Tim. We’ll be outside, even if it snows. Just take the old one. It’s not like you can’t use it. It’s just a tiny rip.’
‘Well, you take it then, if there’s nothing wrong with it.’
‘What’s the matter, you two?’ said Sofia, passing through the scene on her way down through the house.
‘Florence won’t let me have the only decent roll mat,’ said Tim, looking sideways and folding in his lips.
‘Well can’t you share it?’ said Sofia, in all her innocence. ‘Why can’t Florence take it first and then you pack it when she’s back?’
Florence closed her eyes and spoke with patient irritation.
‘It’s the same weekend, Mum. Thursday, 31 March to Sunday, 3 April? Tim’s not leaving until Friday, from Carl’s house, but it’ll be too late by then. He’s on Cub Camp. I’m on Silver D of E.’
‘Oh,’ said Sofia. She hadn’t registered they would be away at the same time. ‘But it’s not too bad, is it? Isn’t it the same one I used to use?’
It was the one she used to use. A corner had been almost ripped right off the end, and the whole thing dropped blackened foam pieces across the floor.
‘It’s ancient, Mum,’ said Tim, ‘like it’s dying and shedding all its skin. Slightly less comfortable than lying on a brick.’
‘Well, I’ll order you another one. They’re not that expensive.’
‘He didn’t even want it ’til he saw me start to pack,’ Florence said scornfully, taking the roll mat back to join the rest of her equipment.
Sofia went online later that evening. Even the aluminium-backed ones were less than £10 each. In the end she got two – one half price. It was always handy to have a spare. Just as she was putting in the security code, her phone buzzed: a text message from Freya, Ben’s mum.
Hi Sofia. Would Isaac like to sleep over on Ben’s birthday – three weeks’ time? Apparently I promised… F XXX.
The significance didn’t strike her, until much later on.
Sixteen
Tuesday, 15 March 2016
Maalik entered the library even more buoyantly than usual, his short legs propelling him to their regular table with a barely restrained spring.
‘Morning, Mrs Gardener.’
She was just finishing up her cards on science and nature. Wegener proposes theory of Pangaea. Sonar technology leads to theory of plate tectonics; World Wide Web invented. It wouldn’t be long before she could start to write the thing itself.
She did wish that eight weeks into their mutual agreement he might at least bring himself to call her Sofia.
‘Today I have good news.’ Maalik sat down with a beaming smile. ‘I have booked my IELTS test. Three months from now – middle of June. £170 cash I pay to my friend Wojciech, and he has done online payment on credit card for me.’
‘Oh, that’s great,’ she said, suddenly feeling the responsibility attached to what she’d taken on. £170 was no small sum for him, to achieve the score of 4.5, the key to citizenship he craved. He’d gone for the original test of all four skills – though an unproven “speaking only” version was now available. The former had been internationally recognised for the last quarter-century, and Maalik didn’t have the money to risk his investment falling flat.
‘I have prepared a study plan,’ he said. ‘So, I was thinking, two weeks on informal letters, then two weeks on semi-formal, then two weeks on formal, and then I will write an essay every week on different topic for last six weeks?’
Sofia was full of admiration. She couldn’t imagine being fluent in any other language, let alone using it as metaknowledge to plan her further improvement in it.
‘That sounds great,’ she said. ‘We can start on informal letters today. The only problem is,’ she still couldn’t decide whether to take the plunge or not, ‘I might not be able to do the final week in March.’
Maalik was, as ever, magnanimous in the face of obstacles. ‘That is no problem at all, no problem. I will study by myself that week. You have a check-up, perhaps? Or maybe you are going somewhere nice?’
‘I’ve been invited to a reunion.’
‘What is that exactly?’ He knew that unions represented workers, and that the prefix “re” meant “again”, but as with so many words in English, they made no sense when conjoined.
‘It’s when people get together – old friends, or family, or people from your work.’
‘So, this is work reunion?’
‘It’s friends from university. People I used to know.’
‘So, I think you must go, Mrs Gardener. Friends are most important thing in life. How long you haven’t see them for? I’m thinking maybe ten or fifteen years?’
‘It’s ages, and it would be great to see them all again. It’s just…’
The cause of her concern seemed frivolous, given his dreadful loss, and yet she looked to him to sanction her foray.
‘I’d need to leave Isaac. Hugo’s away again, and Florence and Tim are off camping. I could leave him with Freya – it’s Ben’s sixth birthday in fact – but Isaac’s never stayed away from home before. Not on his own, that is.’
‘Ben is Isaac’s friend?’
‘Yes – the one he told you about when you drove us back in the car.’
‘And it is Ben’s sixth birthday?’
‘Yes, he’s just a bit older than Isaac.’
‘Well then, I think you have to go. Isaac will have – how do you say it – a time like a whale.’
‘A whale of a time.’ She laughed as she corrected him. They’d been doing idioms just the week before.
‘And you – I think you will have whale of time too. It isn’t easy looking after children every day. You cook; you clean; you do tidying; you help them with all the homework they have to do. I think it’s good for you to have like little holiday.’
‘I’m not sure it’ll be that relaxing,’ she confessed ruefully. ‘We’re climbing,’ she said, pretending to pull herself up hand over hand. ‘It used to be a hobby of mine. Something we all did. I just hope I remember how to do it, or I’ll feel a complete fool.’
‘Climbing with rope?’
‘Oh yes, it’s all very controlled. It’s just my ego that’s at stake.’
She saw his forehead start to wrinkle. ‘Ego is like pride. I mean my pride is the only problem. I’ll be embarrassed if I’ve forgotten what to do.’
‘I think you will remember,’ Maalik said gravely. ‘These activities, these kind of skills, they stay with you in your blood. I always remember how to ride bicycle, even it is five years between I have one in Somalia and I manage to buy one here. It is, how do you express it, easy as falling off a log.’
He opened his book at the exercise from the previous week, then turned to her with his final word on the matter.
‘It is all good, Mrs Gardener. Fresh air. Exercise. We cannot learn everything from book. You should go, Mrs Gardener. You must go.’
When he left two hours later for the car wash, she reached obediently for her phone and texted the message that would release her from maternity for two whole days.
Isaac would absolutely love it. Thanks, Freya. See you soon. Catch up on 1 April. Sofia XXX
Then she made a rare foray into social media and managed to locate the ROX reunion page. She accepted a pending invite to join the group – wondering for just how many years it had been sitting there – and waited.
The faces, when they came, were middle aged. Skin rougher, hair coarser, eye sockets more defined. Two were instantly recognisable though. She’d barely known them really, but they’d shared a tent on occasion, giggling in the darkness with sweet cidery breath. The person she had been there for, who was absent from the scene and would be absent again, had left in his place just a blank picture profile – all for professional reasons, she supposed. But acquaintances were all she needed for the purpose of this online visit, which was to let the crowd know that Sofia lived on. The enviably lithe and clever one, laughing her way through obstacles and striving for the top, would this time be present, without a doubt.
She messaged the two girls she had known the best, Bobby and Clara, to excuse away her previous absence and confirm she’d be there.
*
Sofia walked from bathroom cabinet to bedroom, from spare room to bedroom, from kitchen cabinet to bedroom, on an automatic trajectory, gathering items from shelves and drawers and cupboards without decision-making, as if they were familiar companions with whom she travelled all the time, tossing them lightly onto the rucksack pile which formed a Daliesque cairn. It was twenty years since she had filled a backpack to travel on her own, but her limbs remembered exactly what to fetch and where to take her, and within an hour, the rucksack sat squat and replete, the little stegosaurus logo pushed stiffly outwards on its plastic dais.
As she examined the loops near the top, she remembered the roll mat which had arrived that morning and fetched it from Tim’s bedroom, unfurling it from its twin. She rolled it up tightly and slid it into place, where it slotted there as neatly as if it were all meant to be. Her phone beeped. Message from Bobby.
All meeting at Square and Compass, 7-ish, Thursday night.
She messaged back.
Fantastic. Aim to catch up with you all then.
Then, without quite knowing why, she removed the rucksack from its central location and took it upstairs to tuck it behind the attic door.
ARTS AND RECREATION
(SPORT AND ENTERTAINMENT)
Seventeen
Monday, 28 March 2016
They were watching University Challenge in the living room. For years it had served as a form of marital mortar, holding them in one location when they might otherwise have gravitated solitarily to their preferred activities, neither of them suggesting or wishing to watch it, nor taking steps to turn it off. On the rare nights when they were both at home and the children were in bed, they’d sensed they ought to sit together, as other couples did. Then having reconciled themselves, silently and without agreement, to giving up their respective evenings of writing and research, they would find themselves unexpectedly absorbed by the youthful participants, who grinned and blinked shyly through their retro glasses, laughing at their own unbelievable stupidity in misnaming a little-known sixteenth-century artist or getting the term for some obscure visual pigment wrong.
Hugo always seemed to want each of the contestants to score as successfully as the next and would nod encouragingly at every stuttered or rephrased response, rocking forward as if to influence the results, as another type of man might have urged his football team to shoot. Tonight, Sofia wondered if this absorption was – had always been – a front, to absolve himself of the need to engage in dangerous conversation, remove the possibility of having to look her in the face. It wasn’t exactly as if he needed to concentrate on working out the answers. He was probably reeling them off in his head as he had in the pub quiz, quicker than Paxman could get them out. Ergo, he could afford to spend all his extant energy on preserving the impression that everything was all right.
She decided she would do the same then, staring impassively at the screen. He’d be gone in half an hour anyway, supposedly to catch an early flight to the USA. She’d never questioned it before – his staying overnight to make sure he was there on time. Now she wondered whether it was part of an equation that all added up. The conference didn’t start until Friday. He was conscientious, always getting there a day before to make sure everything was in place. How Flo had loved to hear from him on those hotel nights, ever since she was small, wanting a description of the room, the little shampoo bottles she knew he would bring back home and whether he thought he’d be able to snaffle away a miniature jar of jam at breakfast time. Sometimes, Sofia recalled, he hadn’t been able to promise those things. Perhaps he hadn’t actually been where all those things might be.
