A. Miller - The Faithful Couple

‘All right. Is Stacy with him?’

‘You know Stacy,’ Dan said.

Neil tried to smile an assent, although in fact he didn’t know Stacy, had never met her, not counting one occasion on which he had waved at a woman whom he presumed was Stacy through the window of a car that he likewise (perhaps naively) assumed was Dan’s, the time they had come to pick up Sam in London the previous year. Neil had no interest in knowing Stacy. He let it go. ‘I’ll call the doctor,’ he said.

Dan picked up his cooling coffee and put it down again with a noisy clack. Neil wanted him to leave now. He glanced at his watch, then regretted it.

‘This euro thing,’ Dan said. ‘It hurting you?’

Neil wasn’t sure where to begin and didn’t much want to. But he saw that Dan was trying. He had a momentary, compassionate intuition of how hard this must be for him, all of it.

‘Depends,’ he said. ‘Depends which way you bet. It’s been bad for some people but okay for us. The money’s got to go somewhere, you just have to make sure you get there first.’

‘Yeah,’ Dan said. ‘Right.’ He looked down at the bar. ‘This antique, then?’ He rapped his knuckles on the Formica surface.

The front door opened. Roxanna wheeled the buggy in, closing the door fastidiously, hoping Leila might sleep for another half an hour. Neil could hear her being quiet — the effortful, tiptoeing footfalls and delicate clinks as keys and bags were shed.

She saw Dan first, straight away looking behind her at the closed door as if assessing her flight chances. Then she saw Neil.

‘Just gone off,’ she stage-whispered.

‘This her?’ Dan said. ‘This must be her.’

He sank off the stool and headed for the buggy. Neil experienced a stab of limbic horror at the prospect of Dan touching his child, his rough hands on her flawless skin, the contamination. One of his arms twitched in Dan’s direction but he reined it back.

‘She’s just gone —’

‘Let him,’ Neil said, in a tone so unfamiliar that Roxanna acquiesced and stared, mouth half-open.

Dan unbuckled the girl using his better arm, wincing slightly as he lifted her out of the buggy with both. She was asleep when he nestled her head in the crook of his elbow but opened her eyes when he stroked her cheek. She peered up at his unfamiliar, ragged face, but didn’t cry.

‘Da-da,’ she said.

Neil grimaced.

‘Beautiful girl,’ Dan said. ‘Beautiful.’

‘I should change her,’ Roxanna said.

Dan began a high-pitched, whiny hum, lullaby with a hint of love song. It failed to cohere into a tune and trailed off after a dozen notes. ‘Beautiful like her mum,’ he added.

He offered Roxanna a yellow smile, a tiny, self-parodic flashback to flirty, alpha, mighty Dan. Dan slurping water from the tap. Dan letting Tezza hide in the closet (or perhaps it was the other way around, Neil was no longer certain). Roxanna looked at the floor.

‘More,’ said Leila.

‘This is Roxanna,’ Neil said. ‘Dan.’

Neil wanted to be generous. He knew what a niece or nephew could mean: the salvaging of someone from the mess, an outlet for affections that bottomless grudges had stifled, a chance for atonement. More than that, he owed Dan, he finally understood, because Dan had known about their mother from the beginning, back when they were teenagers themselves. He had lived with the secret for months, Neil’s own, personal human shield, and for all Neil knew everything that had happened to Dan since began with that.

He let his brother handle his child, let him jiggle her and arch his body above her, holding her hands as she took a few precarious, drunkard’s steps. They talked about the possibility of bringing Sam to a hospital in London. No, neither of them had been back to Harrow, a Romanian family had taken the house, Neil said.

‘Dad,’ said Dan, ‘before he died… You probably worked this out, I know you sorted the lawyer and that, the will. He tried to help me… I was having a rough patch, you remember, and — the house — he…’

‘Forget it, Danny,’ Neil said. ‘It’s fine, forget it. Really.’

Dan traced snail trails and mouse runs on the inside of Leila’s arms while Roxanna unloaded her shopping. After a few more minutes, Neil said to his brother, ‘Give her to me now, Dan. Now.’

Sam gave a thumbs up when Neil passed him the iPad, and another when he made a puerile remark about the departed nurse’s arse. Neil regretted the joke immediately: better not to encourage that. Before she left the nurse had put an oxygen mask on Sam’s face, and after that he couldn’t say anything, at least not intelligibly. After a few minutes he closed his eyes. The iPad slid from his hand.

Neil had seen this gear before, on Brian, after his stroke. The ominous tubes, like extruded plastic intestines; the multiple drips; the monitors that made him feel like a cameo turn in the pre-credit sequence of a hospital drama, the heaving chords and contextual sirens of the theme set to cut in at any moment. The whole get-up looked wrong on Sam, outsized and fancy-dress.

He couldn’t make out whether the boy was asleep. Probably he was in and out. Talk: he should talk. ‘Hope you’re comfortable, Sammy. Food okay? Guess you haven’t eaten much. Roxanna sends her love. Leila would send hers too, but she can’t speak yet, unfortunately. So.’

The gossip and niceties ran out pretty quickly. Then what? Depressing to talk about the illness, absurd to ignore it.

‘Doctors seem nice, Sam. They say you’re doing well.’ Or so Dan reported: apart from making sure he scrubbed up on his way in, none of the hospital people said much to Neil at all, even though he was footing the bills, since he wasn’t the primary relative.

‘Does anything hurt?’ He thought he saw Sam grimace. ‘We can get more painkillers if it hurts. Shall I get her back?’

That nurse (Greek, Neil thought, possibly Spanish) ought to do something about the pain. Where the hell was she? Or the flinch might just have been wind, Neil supposed, like the neonatal creases of Leila’s lips that he had optimistically interpreted as smiles. Or Sam might be wholly asleep and dreaming — fighting off muggers, tonguing Lara Croft, failing to revise for his exams, flying down the stairs, whatever the fuck it was that teenagers dreamed about these days. He might be listening to Neil and agreeing, or listening and disagreeing. Or his twitches might be gestures of protest against the cosmic injustice that had landed on him.

‘I’ve seen your father. He seems okay.’ He waited for a flinch but none materialised. ‘Between us we’ll see to everything, Sammy. And Stacy, of course. Whoever the hell Stacy is. Don’t worry about your exams, I’ll find someone to take them for you. I could get someone to take care of Stacy too, if you like.’

No flinch; no smile. Ridiculous, in a way, to ramble on when it was unlikely that Sam was listening. But these hospital-ward monologues were a bit like cooing over your child in public. You didn’t feel embarrassed, you just had to do it. You had to talk, partly because it was the only thing you could do, and partly because of the strange, irrational apprehension that if you didn’t keep talking, that might be the end.

What else? Reminiscences: ‘… that time you came to stay with me and Jess, you ate that knickerbocker glory, remember? You puked in a plant in the restaurant foyer, all over it… That waitress… The time we went out to that old airfield, you remember, I let you drive the car — how old were you? — and I had to grab the wheel back…’

Reminiscences might be ill-advised, Neil saw, contrasting as they did the whackily eventful past and uncertain future. He trailed off.

Once, as a teenager, Neil had witnessed two men beating up a third outside a Tube station, their shoes thudding dully into his midriff and skull. He had run over, a reflex rather than premeditated valour, but the men had done enough and ambled away. To his surprise the victim sat up, coughed, spat and walked off. Up close, even routine violence was the worst thing in the world.