A. Miller - The Faithful Couple

Mothers.

‘What do you —’

‘It’s only ever half of you, Neil. As if it’s a part-time job or something. It’s not only Adam, it’s like a bit of you’s missing.’

‘What are you talking about?’

Jess laid the knife on the chopping board and looked down at the sliced mozzarella. He could still be surprised by how short she was without heels.

She sighed, then looked up at him. ‘Is this it, then?’ She had stopped her automated cooking, but for a moment Neil thought she was talking about their dinner. He glanced at the hob. ‘I mean, for us, you twat.’

‘Is what, what? What, Jess?’

He came round to her side of the counter, cornering her. Her face, from where he was standing, jutted into an outsized photograph of serried candy that hung on the wall behind her. She had bought it at the Museum of Modern Art, on a trip to New York for a meeting about a new Arab soft drink. Damage limitation: shut this down, get out alive.

‘Come off it, Neil.’

‘Jess,’ Neil began, torn between wanting to talk her down and take her on, compromising on a soft, almost passive disagreement that vaguely implied she was unstable, and might have been expressly designed to infuriate her. ‘Come on. We’ve hardly ever talked about it.’

‘I suppose Adam’s brats are enough for you.’

True: them and Sam, who was almost his, Neil was coming to believe, as much his, in a way, as he was his father’s. Neil never wanted or expected to have babies of his own. He didn’t feel equipped or trained for them, as if he were an animal that had been abandoned too early to know the proper procedure.

‘What the hell are you talking about?’

‘Oh, grow up, Neil. Fucking grow up. You can’t be fifteen for ever, or however old you were when she died. Did you really think we’d go on like this indefinitely? Fuck, fuck, weekend break, fuck, fuck, conversation, new TV. Sex and holidays and buying cool appliances together.’

‘Let’s discuss it, then. Please.’ Crying doesn’t make you right, he thought.

She pushed past Neil, leaning into him more than she strictly needed to when their shoulders collided, Neil yielding less than he might have done. She retreated to the bathroom and closed the door. Neil picked up the mozzarella packet, meaning to put it in the bin, but some of the amniotic fluid was still sloshing inside the plastic, and he spilled it over the black and white floor. He swore and kneeled to wipe up the mess with a tea towel.

Jess came back while he was crouching, walking at speed and purposefully, her heels crackling on the tiles. ‘You’ve done it again,’ she said, in a voice that sounded angrier for being quiet. Her knee seemed to jerk in the direction of his forehead, and he momentarily feared she would injure him. The hand that wasn’t holding the tea towel reached to fend her off. ‘Your hair,’ she said. ‘Your fucking hair.’

Neil’s hand moved to the crown of his head, pausing to finger the mole on his neck as it passed upwards.

‘In the sink. Your fucking stubble. How many times?’

She slammed the front door on her way out. Neil stood up.

He hadn’t told her that Adam had known about Rose. He lied to her about Adam’s lie.

‘Are you getting divorced?’

Neil tickled Sam under his armpits.

‘Stop it,’ Sam said, kicking out. Neil moved out of range of the flailing legs. ‘Stop it, Neil,’ Sam repeated.

He fell, muddying his knees on the furrowed ground beneath the zip wire; he tried to brush his trousers with his hands, dirtied his palms, and rubbed them on his backside. He wiped his nose with a grimy index finger.

‘Are you?’ Sam asked again, not letting him off. Usually Jess came on their outings, but, since their quarrel three days before, she had been working to rule. She was businesslike, efficient in the discharge of her cohabitee’s duties (tumble dryer, message from Brian, milk), but remote. She didn’t feel for Sam what Neil did, she wasn’t even close. She couldn’t face the acting.

‘We’re not married,’ Neil said. ‘So we can’t get divorced.’

‘You know what I mean,’ Sam said, impatient with the grown-up quibbling.

At eleven his face was leaner and his hair darker than they had once been. Physically he could still have passed for nine, but there was something worldly in his grey-green eyes and the shadows around them, a precocious intuition that life was not on his side, as you might expect in a child who spent too much time with his taciturn and immobile grandfather, and had seen his father wet himself. ‘Fallen off the wagon,’ Brian had whispered, though the last time Neil had seen Dan, his clammy skin and dull eyes, he worried that drink might not be the half of it. Dan had quit his plumbing course after a month.

‘I don’t know,’ Neil said. ‘Jess and me, we haven’t decided. Don’t think so.’

‘Do you, you know, love her and all that?’

‘To be honest, Sammy, I don’t know.’

The following month, on the day of the bombs, the day people spoke to strangers and called their relatives — ranking them as they dialled, the instant, city-wide census of emotional priorities — Neil phoned Adam before he called Jess. He was furious with Adam but he called him first.

‘Huh,’ Sam said, racing away across the playground, his proto-adult interests supplanted by puerile ones, the twin identities overlapping and ironising each other. Beyond the playground fence and the scarred park trees, two giant yellow cranes supervised north-west London, ominously arrogant, the Triffids of the boom.

Sam climbed the frame and suspended himself from the monkey bars by the backs of his muddied knees. ‘No hands! I can!’ He began to cross the bars, his arms showily dangling.

Brian raised a palm from his thigh and indicated the danger with a wave, the weak swish of a superannuated pontiff. ‘Careful,’ he said. ‘Tell him.’

‘He’s fine,’ Neil said. ‘Leave him.’

Halfway across Sam’s foot hit a bar instead of rising over it; he tried again, was blocked again by the bar. He reached up with his arms but his stomach muscles wouldn’t support him. Gravity took its chance, and for a moment Sam’s free leg cycled in the air, the concrete awaited, and Neil thought the worst was happening, was truly and actually happening, in nauseating slow motion and on his watch.

Who’s sorry now? His mother’s voice rushed back to him, its crackly timbre as she crooned the old song she would launch into when he had improvidently ignored her advice.

Sam’s errant leg regained the bar, and with the extra purchase he managed to swing his arms up. He dropped feet-first and harmlessly into a perfect landing.

The all-or-nothing moment passed, and it turned out to have been nothing. Neil glanced at Brian but he hadn’t stirred (head on walking stick, face in grimace). He had experienced the same, transfixed powerlessness in California, when those strangers surrounded him, the police en route, Neil sensing that his life was taking a drastic turn but unable to correct it. He had thought of his mother then, too, wanting her to be there, a craving he hadn’t felt for years, at the same time pleased that she could never know.

Sam was fine. Still, Neil felt as if some internal organ of his own had been bruised. His breathing was laboured. The child’s balls hadn’t dropped, for Christ’s sake. He hadn’t done anything yet. Travel, friendships. Sex.

Fifteen. Did you know that, you asshole?

‘If you get divorced,’ Sam said, ‘can I come and live with you?’

‘I don’t think so, Sammy. It wouldn’t be allowed.’

No harm done. Almost certainly no harm done.

‘Who says?’

‘You’d be too far away from your school.’