Pat Barker: Another World

‘No. C’mon, Gareth, we’re all waiting. Apart from anything else, it isn’t very polite to your mother.’

He always says that when he means it isn’t very polite to him. ‘I haven’t brushed my teeth.’

‘You brush your teeth after meals.’

‘And before. The main acid attack —’

Gareth can go on like this for hours. ‘All right, but be quick.’

You’ve got to hand it to him, Nick thinks, as Gareth sidles past. It’s virtually impossible to tell a child off for paying too much attention to dental hygiene. He looks round the room, thinking how typical of Gareth it is that while every other part of the house is in chaos from the move, this room is orderly. Games, neatly stacked by the computer: Crash, Fighting Force, Mortal Kombat, Shock, Riot, Alien Trilogy, Rage, Streetfighter, Return Fire, Warhawk, Nightmare Creatures, Shadowmaster, Exhumed . In the school holidays Gareth spends, probably, forty hours a week playing these. They know they ought to stop him, and they don’t, because they’re only too bloody pleased to have him out of their hair. Once or twice Nick’s tried, but as soon as Gareth becomes seriously upset — and of course he does, it’s like taking the teat out of a baby’s mouth — Fran switches sides. She’ll never ever back Nick up. And he’s left feeling… neutered. Yes, that’s the right word, neutered. He’s so powerless in the situation he wonders why Gareth bothers to dislike him.

Behind the locked door, Gareth starts to clean his teeth. No scrubbing up and down, no wearing away of the gums. ‘Like stencilling,’ the dentist says. Done properly, it takes a long time. Flossing next. And then another go with the brush at all the places where he’s drawn blood.

When he’s finished he spits, rinses his mouth, spits again, then turns on the tap and watches the pinky-white splats swirl away.

Lastly, he gets Nick’s toothbrush from the rack, runs it several times round the lavatory bowl, under the rim where the germs lurk, inspects it for too obvious bits of shit, and restores it neatly to its place. Then, exchanging a glance with his reflection in the mirror, he dabs the last flecks of foam from his lips and goes, slowly and carefully, downstairs.

Miranda eats the burnt potatoes stoically, making no comment. Gareth spits them out. Nick takes a deep breath, opens his mouth, thinks better of it. The meal proceeds in silence except for Jasper’s good-humoured babble.

‘Is he talking yet?’ Miranda asks.

She’s only trying to make conversation, but Fran, undermined by the table manners of one son, doesn’t feel like discussing the linguistic inadequacies of the other. ‘Would you like baked beans instead?’

‘No, he wouldn’t,’ Nick says. ‘He can eat what he’s given like everybody else.’

Fran glares at him. Why, Nick thinks, is he continually goaded into acting like Gareth’s father — his ‘real’ father, whatever that means — and then choked off the moment he attempts it? Even when they’d gone to see the educational psychologist together he’d scarcely been allowed to say anything. He’d had to sit and listen while Fran propounded her theory that poor little Gareth was being bullied at school. Perhaps he is. But what precipitated his referral to the school psychology service was an incident in which he and another boy had upended a four-year-old and rammed his head into a lavatory bowl, which they then proceeded to flush.

Which hardly counts as being bullied.

You don’t like him, she’d said, when Nick finally exploded.

No, I don’t, he thought, looking at the gob of spat-out potato. Who could?

‘Can I get down now?’ Gareth asks.

‘Yes, all right,’ Fran sighs. ‘Off you go.’

Clearing away the table a few minutes later, Nick says, ‘He warmed up to Miranda, didn’t he?’

‘Jasper?’

‘I didn’t mean Gareth.’

‘More than she did to him.’

‘She’s not used to babies.’

‘Christ Almighty, Nick, will you stop defending her before she’s attacked? She doesn’t have to like babies. I wish I didn’t.’

‘You don’t.’

‘What?’

‘Like babies. You like the idea of them.’

‘Oh, very bloody clever. I just wish I wasn’t too tired to appreciate it. I was up all night, remember?’

‘Fran, what do you want me to do? I’m doing the bloody decorating —’

‘Don’t make it sound like a favour. You live here too, you know. And Miranda.’

‘That’s it, isn’t it?’ A pause. ‘You knew I had a daughter. I took Gareth on.’

‘No, you didn’t. You’re a lousy stepfather, you know you are.’

Nick starts to speak and checks himself. ‘Well, whatever I am, at least I’m here.’

‘Meaning? No, go on.’

‘Doesn’t matter.’

‘Meaning his father wasn’t?’

‘Let’s not have a row, Fran. Not tonight.’

‘We’re not having a row!’

‘Well, he wasn’t, was he?’

‘All right, he wasn’t. So what else is new?’

Nick sighs and puts his hand on the bulge. ‘How’s number two?’

‘Three. You might at least get the number right.’

‘It’s going to be all right, you know. It’s bound to be awful at the moment because the house is in such a mess, but it will get better.’

Made jealous by the intensity of the conversation, Jasper pushes between them, crying to be picked up. Fran bends down and lifts him into her arms. ‘I’ll take him up.’

‘OK. I’ll finish this.’

At the top of the kitchen steps she turns. ‘I thought we might get a video tonight.’

‘Yeah, fine. Whatever.’

Miranda curls up on the cushions, and draws the curtain half across, wishing she had a book to read, like Jane Eyre, with pictures of birds and frozen wastes, but Gran hadn’t let her pack any books because they weighed a ton, she said, though Miranda carried them, she didn’t. Instead she presses her face against the glass, misting it with her breath, feeling like a prisoner in a tower, but a nice feeling, not like a real prisoner — and then she remembers her last sight of Mum, standing at the end of a long corridor in the hospital, hugging herself, sunlight from the tall windows showing up all the wrinkles and grey hair.

She didn’t go in voluntarily, she was ‘sectioned’, a horrible word that makes Miranda think of dissecting small animals.

Unable to bear thinking about it, she jumps up, and starts brushing her hair, pressing down hard till it crackles and clings to the bristles. If you do that long enough and then tear paper into tiny bits and drag your hair across it, all the bits fly upwards and stick to the ends. Angie showed her how to do it when she slept over once, and afterwards they brushed their hair in the dark and you could see the sparks. And then Angie said, ‘What’s wrong with your mum?’ And she said, ‘Nothing.’ She wanted to ask, ‘Why?’ but didn’t dare.

‘Somebody’s been putting green fly on my roses.’ After they were sprayed the buds had millions of dead flies all over them, like caps of grey scurf.

A knock on the door. It’s Gareth, blinking in that awful way of his, like a cat when it wants to be friends, though with Gareth it means the opposite.

‘Come on, then,’ he says.

‘Come on where?’

‘I’ve got to show you the garden.’

She starts to close the door. ‘Seen it.’

‘Your dad said.’

Miranda hesitates. Probably Dad had said it: he was keen on her and Gareth ‘getting on’. ‘All right.’

She’s taller than he is, but the extra height only makes her feel exposed, like a giraffe with a pale soft belly walking with a hyena. She doesn’t know how to deal with him, he’s so unrelentingly horrible, all the time, and she hasn’t done anything. It would be better if they just avoided each other, but Dad won’t let them do that. They’ve got to be friends, because that makes him feel better.