'No?' The woman looked around at the other guests, clearly considering herself to be their spokesperson. Ben felt his anger rise and tried to ignore it, knowing he'd had too much to drink.
'Do you have any children yourself?' she asked.
'Only by marriage.'
'Er, shall we—' Maggie began, but the woman wasn't going to be diverted.
'And do you smack them when they misbehave, or let them run riot?'
'Since he's autistic he wouldn't understand why you were hitting him, so there wouldn't be much point,' Ben said. 'Unless you think I should beat him anyway as a matter of principle.'
The woman's cheeks flooded with colour. She turned her head away sharply. The room was dreadfully silent.
Well, that's one way to kill a party, he thought, and then Maggie was lurching to her feet.
'Coffee, anyone?' she asked with a cheerfulness that was almost hysterical. Ben saw the quiver in her smile and felt ashamed of himself. As relieved conversation began to spread once more, he left the dinner table and went upstairs to the bathroom.
He urinated, avoiding looking at himself in the mirror as he washed his hands. Time to go home. He hadn't been in a party mood before, and he was even less so now. Apart from his guilt at making a scene, the mention of Jacob had stirred up all sorts of emotional silt. Which was his own fault, but that didn't make it any better. He would quietly make his excuses and leave, he decided.
He didn't think he'd be missed.
He opened the bathroom door and found Colin waiting outside. 'I hoped it was you in there,'he said, straightening.
'Look, I'm sorry about what happened, I know I should have kept my mouth shut,' Ben began, but Colin wasn't listening.
'I need to talk.' His voice was low and urgent. He took hold of Ben's arm and led him away from the stairs. He opened the door to his study and turned on the light. Maggie's heavy hand was apparent even in here, unless Colin's taste in colours ran to mauve. The new computer monitor on the leather-topped desk seemed both anachronistically modern and honest in comparison to the expensive but chintzy reproduction furniture. Colin closed the door. His eyes had a glazed look, and with surprise Ben saw that his friend was drunk.
'What's the matter?'
Beneath the alcohol blush his friend's face was drawn. He glanced nervously at the door. 'I'm having an affair.' The attempt at sounding casual failed. He gave a weak smile at Ben's expression. 'I know. I can't believe it either.' Ben had the feeling that there must be a sort of etiquette for this kind of conversation, but he had no idea what it was.
'Who is she?'
Colin ran his hand along the edge of his computer keyboard, checking for non-existent dust. 'She works for a management company. They represent one of our bands.'
There was a peculiar relief that at least it wasn't anyone more glamorous. 'How long has it being going on for?'
'Nearly a month. I've known her for longer than that, but not…it's always been in a professional context before. Then a few weeks ago there was a party to celebrate the band's new album release, and we got talking, and…it sort of happened.'
'Have you seen her since?'
'About half a dozen times. She doesn't live far from the office, so we go to her flat at lunch-time. And once or twice I've told Maggie I've been working late.' He gave a humourless laugh. 'That old chestnut.' He sat down. 'I just can't believe it's happened. I never thought I was the affair type.'
Neither had Ben, but he didn't say that 'Does Maggie know?'
'Oh, Christ, no!' Colin looked horrified. 'She's no idea. No, no one knows. I wasn't even going to tell you, but…' He ran a hand through his hair, leaving one thin strand sticking up. 'I just feel such a fucking shit. She wanted me to make a speech tonight.'
'So are you going to finish it? With the girl, I mean?'
Colin took a moment to answer. 'I don't think I can.' He sounded miserable.
'What about her? The girl. What does she think?'
'We haven't really talked about it.' He gave Ben a peculiar look. 'She's only twenty-two.'
It was almost a boast, and Ben found himself on the verge of a grin, an automatic slide into male collusion. But both of them seemed to draw away from it at the same time. Ben thought of Maggie and her frumpy dresses, in competition without realising it with a girl ten years younger, and felt an unexpected pity for her.
'What are you going to do?' he asked.
'I haven't a fucking clue.'
There was a silence in which Ben wished he could think of something constructive to say. Colin stood up.
'Well, I suppose we'd better go back to the party.'
Ben stayed till the end. Not just for Colin's sake, but also for Maggie's. He felt that leaving early would be a slap in the face for her. One she might not actually notice, he admitted, but he still couldn't bring himself to do it. As the two of them came to the door to say goodnight he wished Colin hadn't told him about the affair. He didn't want to feel sorry for Maggie but he couldn't help it.
'Thanks, it's been great,' he lied, leaning into the aura of her flowery, unerotic perfume to kiss an over-powdered cheek.
'Glad you've enjoyed it. Thank you for coming,' she said, and for a second, as they looked at each other, social smiles firmly in place, he felt that the insincerity was openly exposed between them. His smile became stiff as he broke the contact and said goodnight to Colin, trying to make it seem as natural as he could. Feeling shoddy and two-faced, he hurried down the steps to the waiting taxi before he gave anything else away.
He shared the cab with a couple from the party who lived on the same side of town. The polite conversation petered out before the first mile, and they rode in the silence of people who have nothing in common, masking the awkwardness by staring through the windows.
After they had been dropped off, Ben spread himself out on the taxi seat and realised that he didn't feel remotely tired. Or drunk. Since his brief clash with the woman and Colin's revelation, he had stuck to coffee.
The cab trolled through the dark streets, the meter clicking softly in the background. He couldn't make up his mind whether the affair showed that Colin wasn't as staid as he was beginning to look, or if it was part of a premature mid-life crisis, a last kick against the social and family shackles that were tightening around him. Ben felt relieved that he wasn't in that situation, until the barrenness of his own came back to him. What the fuck did he have to feel smug about? He tried telling himself that at least he and Sarah had had a good relationship, that they'd been faithful to each other, but the irony was too obvious for him to draw any comfort. Looked at in another way, their entire marriage had been a sham, built around the illusion that Jacob was Sarah's real son.
He knew that wasn't true, but the guilt he felt for thinking it fed his growing mood of self-disgust. And self-pity, if he was going to be honest. He stared morosely through the window.
The taxi was coming to a commercial area, darkened shops with neon signs, and pubs with the last of the night's customers still spilling from them. He looked at his watch. It wasn't even midnight. It just felt as if the evening had gone on for ever.
The cab turned down a side street. It was quieter than the main road and badly lit. Two girls were standing under one of the few working streetlamps. They were heavily made up, with short, tight dresses showing fleshy thighs. One of them gave Ben a smile as they watched the taxi go past. It was a professional invitation, but in his loneliness even that seemed to offer comfort. There was a hot constriction in the pit of his stomach. He leaned forward to tell the driver to stop, then sank back in his seat without speaking. He hadn't sunk that low. Not yet.
Besides, I'd only be wasting my money. He wondered who he was to have felt even briefly smug about Colin's infidelity. At least Colin could still get it up.
Further along another girl was walking slowly up and down in the dim blue glare from a closed newsagent's window. She had dark hair and her face was in shade, but for some reason Ben thought of Sandr
a Kale. His gut tightened again, and for an instant there was a tug of something so dark and illicit he didn't recognise it. Then it was gone, leaving an unspecified sense of depression. He tried to lift himself out of it by thinking about going to Tunford the next day, but that only made him feel worse. It seemed to him now that there was something not quite wholesome about his eagerness to return. The justification that it was for Jacob rang false. He was struck with the sordidness of what he was doing, skulking around with his long lens like some sweaty voyeur.
And enjoying it.
His self-loathing was so thick he could taste it as he paid off the taxi driver and went inside. He stood in the dark hallway, listening to the sound of the untenanted rooms. The house pressed in on him, claustrophobic in its vastness. No Jacob. No Sarah. He realised he was crying. He lashed out and punched the wall and felt the jolt sear from his knuckles to his shoulder. Goaded by the pain, he seized the cherrywood cabinet and tore it down. It toppled against the wall on the other side and lodged at an angle. There was a crack of breaking wood, a chime of the telephone falling off. He thought of how he and Sarah had bought the cabinet when they were first married, and the stab of remorse incensed him. He kicked wildly at it, punishing himself with each splintering blow, stamping on it until it crashed over sideways and its mirror shattered in a cascade of silver fragments.
Ben stood over it, panting. The rage dwindled and vanished.
He looked at the shattered cabinet and felt a sadness so great he thought he would never climb out of it. He stepped over the wreckage and went into the lounge. There was enough light coming through the window to guide him to the sideboard. He groped inside until he found the bottle of vodka and took it with a glass to the settee.
Then he sat down and set about getting drunk.
The light was shining directly into his face. It seemed to have a physical weight, pressing on his temples and eyelids like a vice.
He turned away from it, trying to retreat from the pain back into sleep. The movement made it worse. His head throbbed and there was a stiffness in his neck that stabbed from his shoulder to his skull. Dimly he became aware that something was wrong. His posture was cramped and uncomfortable, the surface under his head too firm to be a pillow.
Reluctantly, he opened his eyes.
A textured pattern, like seaweed, swam into focus. Ben blinked at it, but the distant panic at not recognising what it was paled in the face of the way his head was hurting.
The pain seemed to increase with consciousness, until finally the discomfort of his position outweighed his reluctance to move.
He rolled over. The banging pulse behind his eyes made him shut them. When he tentatively opened them again he found himself looking up at the living-room ceiling. He was on the settee. The seaweed pattern had been the tasselled edge of a cushion he'd had screwed up beneath his neck. He lay there as memories of the previous night returned to him.
He sat up and sucked in his breath at the sudden pain.
Holding his hands to his temples, he slowly swung his feet to the floor. They struck something hard and cold. He looked down and saw an overturned tumbler lying in a stained patch of carpet. The memory of vodka nauseated him. He took a few deep breaths through his mouth until the feeling had passed, and then stood up.
He'd been expecting the clamour in his head, but it was still almost enough to make him sit back down again. He swayed on his feet, waiting until the worst of it subsided, and then gingerly made his way into the hall. It was the first real hangover he'd had since he'd been out with Zoe.
His body felt as though it had been taken apart during the night and badly reassembled, so that none of the parts fitted together properly. He paused when he saw the wrecked cabinet. It was ruined beyond any hope of repair, but just then he felt too ill for the regret to make any impression. One self-punishment at a time.
He took two paracetamol, followed them with a glass of liver salts, and splashed cold water on his face and the back of his neck. Then he sat at the kitchen table with his head in his hands and waited for it to stop hurting.
The self-disgust he'd felt the night before had been pushed aside by the more immediate misery of his hangover. It seemed inconsequential now, and he was already forgetting it as he looked at the clock and estimated how soon he could pull himself together and go to Tunford.
When the worst of the shivers had passed, he poured himself a glass of orange juice and went to load his camera.
By lunch-time his hangover had subsided to a general malaise.
It lingered as a dull throb behind his eyes as he peered through the viewfinder at the Kales' back garden. Kale and Jacob were in the central clearing surrounded by scrap. Jacob sat in the car seat while his father moved pieces of scrap around. Sandra was at the kitchen sink, still wearing her bathrobe. During the half-hour that Ben had been watching, none of them had spoken.
He'd hoped he might see them all together, since it was a Sunday, and he'd been so eager to reach his vantage point that he'd almost blundered into a group of children playing in the woods. They were too close to the huddle of oaks for him to risk going to it, so he'd had to wait until their game took them out of sight before he could go down to his den.
He'd urinated against a nearby tree before he'd settled himself inside, knowing that if the children returned he might be stuck in there indefinitely. He'd heard them—or another gang—playing in the distance, but so far they hadn't come back. He hoped the dying leaves still clinging to the branches would be enough to screen him if they did. As he set up the camera and lens, he entertained notions of camouflage netting before deciding that would be going too far. He wasn't doing anything wrong, he told himself.
Not really.
He massaged his temples as he watched Kale place a last piece of scrap and stand back to regard his handiwork. Ben couldn't see what difference any of it made, but he presumed there must have been some reason. Even Kale wouldn't shift heavy lumps of metal around for the fun of it.
He yawned as Kale went inside the house. Jacob played on, regardless. He had a puzzle game in his hands, a complicated arrangement of steel hoops, and every now and again he would stop and hold one close to his eyes. Trying to catch a glimpse of the spectrum in the reflected sunlight, Ben thought, smiling.
He seemed well enough. There were patches of what looked like oil on his shorts and T-shirt, but that wasn't exactly surprising considering his father's choice of garden furniture.
There was a movement in the doorway. The bull terrier hobbled down the steps like a muscle-bound golem. Ben had forgotten about the dog. He willed Kale or Sandra to reappear as it sniffed around the garden. There was no sign of either of them. He drew in his breath as it approached Jacob and lunged up at him, but the animal only licked the boy's face. Jacob irritably pushed it away. The dog wagged its tail and flopped down at his feet, tongue hanging from its grinning mouth.
Ben had risen half out of his seat. He sat back down, the thud of his heart echoing painfully in his head. Now Kale came out of the house again, carrying something. He stepped in front of Jacob, blocking him from Ben's view, and let the object fall to the ground.
It was a crumpled car wing. The chrome rim of the headlight was still set in it, spiked with jagged shards of glass.
Kale disappeared inside again and returned a few moments later with a dented car bonnet. It rocked unevenly on the floor when he dropped it next to the wing. Ben focused on them as Kale went back inside. They were the same colour and appeared to be from the same car. It had obviously been involved in a bad crash. The damage was too comprehensive to be from anything other than a collision.
Something about that pricked his consciousness. He shifted the camera to look at the scrap pile itself, adjusting the focus until the individual pieces became clear. Mangled car roofs, radiators, doors, bumpers. There wasn't a smooth or undamaged surface anywhere. Not one. He hadn't really considered it before, except for the danger it posed to Jacob, but now he saw that, like th
e bonnet and wing, everything there showed the scars of some horrendous impact. He panned around the tortured shapes, and for the first time it came to him that Kale wasn't just collecting junked car parts.
It was accident wreckage.
Ben sat back and rubbed his eyes. His head was throbbing badly. He wondered if he wasn't reading too much into things.
And what did it matter anyway? Perhaps Kale was simply a morbid, as well as mad, bastard. But the feeling remained that this was significant in a way he couldn't yet grasp.
He bent back to the camera. Kale was back in the garden.
Ben watched as he continued to move the scrap around, painstakingly shifting and realigning pieces of it as if their precise position actually mattered. Every now and then he would pause to consider the effect, but Ben was at a loss to see any sense to it all. The changes seemed pointless, yet too deliberate to be wholly random, as though there were a purpose to it only the ex-soldier could fathom.
But what the fuck was it? The door opened and Sandra Kale appeared. She had dressed. Her face was made up, her hair combed. Ben guessed she would be going to the pub for the afternoon shift. She looked from her husband to Jacob and said something. It was like watching a film without sound. Kale didn't appear to hear her either. Sandra stared at him, thin-lipped, then jabbed two angry fingers up at his back and flounced back into the house.
The door slammed behind her. A heartbeat later the sound of it carried from the bottom of the hill.
Ben grinned. Sunday harmony chez Kale.
After she'd gone, Kale brought out two plates of sandwiches and gave the smaller to Jacob. He hunkered down on the floor beside him and they both ate, in silence as far as Ben could tell.
At one point they were sitting in almost identical positions, the boy in the car seat, his father on the ground, chewing in unison.
When he'd finished, Kale threw some scraps to the dog, which had been sitting hopefully at their feet. Jacob copied him and went back to his puzzle as Kale took the plates inside.
Ben ate his own sandwiches while he waited for him to reappear. Jacob remained in the garden, moving only once to urinate against the wooden wall of the garden shed. Ben shook his head, angry at this evidence of his new parents' laxness.