‘I hate moths,’ Jason had sobbed. ‘Take it away, Daddy.’ Hysterical with panic, then screaming, and Val getting him out of the bath into a towel, an edge to her voice. ‘That’s enough, Jason, stop it now.’ Disliking his display of fear. ‘Don’t be silly,’ she’d said.
‘He can’t help it,’ Andrew had protested. The furry moth still smacking into the shade, little puffs of powder exploding as it collided with the glass.
Val glared at him. The wrong response. She believed they must be consistent with Jason, and to be fair, they did see eye to eye on most aspects of parenting, but Andrew recognized in her an impatience, a hardness even, that he didn’t share. She talked of toughening Jason up, and resilience and independence, and Andrew would look at the small boy and wonder why love and protection weren’t enough for now. The child’s neediness, his dependency, seemed to rankle with Val, a burr under her skin. She was a practical, dispassionate nurse whenever anyone was ill; caring for her baby with chickenpox in the same manner as she’d looked after her parents when they each became infirm: her mother with dementia and her father with a series of strokes.
Her whole family had been like that really: practical, unsentimental, sharing a belief in hard work, common decency, moderation and frugality. Val’s father had taken over the family ironmonger’s in the late fifties and expanded into general hardware. They’d all worked in the shop, Val after school and on Saturdays until she escaped to university. Once their parents were gone, dying within a year of each other when Jason was seven, her brother got out too. Single and in his thirties, he decided to travel. To everyone’s astonishment, he had entered a monastery in Thailand. He informed Val by postcard. She never heard from him again. They didn’t even know if he was still alive.
They had no way to tell him about Jason.
Andrew had found Val a little intimidating on first acquaintance. Beautiful, with that fine blonde hair and her cool cover-girl looks, but overpowering. It was a union meeting, local authority branch in the upstairs room of a pub. The first he’d attended. He’d have died of boredom but for the antics of this young woman, who repeatedly challenged standing orders and queried points of procedure. He didn’t follow all the ins and outs but could see that some sort of power struggle was under way. Val was a shop steward in environmental health. The meeting ended, they adjourned to the bar downstairs and Andrew ended up sitting opposite her. She interrogated him about the proposed cuts in the planning department and invited him to a fund-raising benefit for anti-apartheid.
He thought she was just drumming up business, but she gave him her undivided attention at the event. He offered to walk her home, and she laughed and said she was hoping for more than a walk. She took him back to the room she had in a shared house and they slept together.
The bathwater was cooling. Andrew drained the last of the brandy and got out. As he lay in bed, he could hear the cadence of conversation downstairs. He woke just after three and his head was throbbing, his stomach cramped. He made it to the bathroom just in time, puking over and over again until he was spent and the waves of nausea receded.
He fed the stove, took some ibuprofen and lay down on the sofa. Waiting for morning to come, for the day to pass, for another night to descend.
Louise
More snow had fallen, smothering everything thick and white. Clouds hung feathery in the sky, their edges an oyster sheen. Louise threw scraps out for the birds and watched them come: the robin and the sparrows. A white Christmas. It was cold, too; she could feel the bite of frost in the air, the snap of it as she breathed in.
Much of the country had ground to a halt, airports closed, cars abandoned, trains marooned. It seemed fitting somehow: the muffled unreality of the weather, the suspension of normal life, the eerie hush, the extreme cold and glittering white world an apt backdrop to Luke in his frozen state, in his white sheets in his quiet white room.
