Эндрю Миллер - Oxygen

‘…iiin the bleeeek mid win’eer… la-A-ang agOOOOO!’ sang the King. Rosinne snuffled and turned in the cradle of his arms. He kissed the top of her head then gently released her, sliding out from beneath her feet.

‘Got a phone in here, Ranch?’

‘Under the bed,’ said Ranch, pointing, but not looking away from the little screen where people very slightly larger than horseflies were doing things to each other. Jo-babe was still on the sheets, contorting herself in a doomed attempt to reach the last line of the drug on her belly. Larry searched under the bed. A Hemingway novel. A copy of L. Ron Hubbard’s Dianetics. A strip of passport photographs showing Ranch ten years back, grinning in a booth somewhere in America Profunda. Also a purple telephone of aerodynamic design with four yards of grey wire connecting it to the socket. He took the phone into the bathroom, slid the wire under the door, then shut the door against the King’s slacks-and-rocking-chair cover of ‘Stille Nacht’.

He had expected Alec, but it was Alice who answered.

‘412…’

‘This is Ground Control,’ said Larry, but Alice, her voice still wrapped in the heavy velvet of sleep, continued her recital of the number.

‘It’s me, Mum. Larry.’

‘Hello dear,’ she said. ‘Ça va? ’

‘Did I wake you?’

‘It’s still dark,’ she said.

‘I’m sorry. I was going to talk to Alec.’

‘Oh, Alec,’ she said. ‘He does his best.’

‘I know,’ said Larry. He had the receiver wedged between his shoulder and his ear, the body of the phone in his left hand. With his right hand he opened the medicine cabinet.

‘How are you feeling?’

‘Not too bad, dear. I haven’t gone mad or anything like that.’

‘Of course not.’ He unhooked the little brass catch on the box. The lid popped up. He could hear very clearly the long drag of his mother’s in-breath.

‘There’s so much to think of,’ she said. ‘Hard to know where to begin.’

‘I’ll be with you soon,’ he said, holding a red-and-blue capsule up to the light and squinting to see the tiny grains of chemistry in it. ‘And Ella too.’

‘Kirsty’s a good girl, Larry.’

‘Yes.’

‘Is she there?’

‘She’s next door.’

‘Come soon, won’t you, dear.’

‘I wish I was there now.’

‘I know, dear.’

‘Go back to sleep, Mum.’

‘You too, dear.’

‘Sweet dreams.’

A sigh. The phone went down. Larry shut the little box, closed the medicine cabinet and wrapped the pills in a sheet of tangerine toilet paper, before slipping them into the envelope with his money.

‘Who wants a piece of the doctor?’ he said, coming back through the door into the big swirl of the King’s music, but the others had their eyes fixed on more private horizons, and no one answered him.

There was a room under the stairs they called the workshop, though like the playroom where no one played any more, it was many years since anyone had worked there. Stephen had used it for repairing his clocks, or, when his hands were not steady enough, for drinking. Some of the gear was still there – the Formica-topped bench and the Sherline lathe – and even after so long the room seemed to have preserved a faint tang of cleaning ammonia and solder, so that Alec could never go in without for an instant seeing the shadow of his father’s back, the air like a sheet on which the print of the sleeper was still visible, a fragile outline that time would eventually smooth out to make the absence perfect.

Above the bench, loops of black flex with bulb sockets at eighteen-inch intervals hung from a steel hook. He unslung the flex and searched in the cupboards for the coloured bulbs, which he found, blue, red, green and yellow, neatly stowed in their corrugated boxes. These were the party lights, and though there was not the slightest need for him to test them tonight – it was another three weeks before Alice’s birthday – he let himself follow the promptings of the moment without question or analysis. He knew when the bulbs had last been used: Alice’s retirement party ten months ago, and the bulbs’ little skullcaps of dust confirmed that they had not been touched since. How well she had seemed then! Allowing herself a measure of optimism, a bullishness the family had been quick to share in. There were plans to travel. France, of course, particularly her beloved Brittany; but she had also sent off for brochures on the Far East and India, and in a short impromptu speech in the orchard at the beginning of the party, she had announced her intention to spend more time, much more time, in California, with Larry and Kirsty and her granddaughter. Among her retirement presents from the school there had been a smart leather holdall, airline carry-on size, and of all the gifts she received that day, none had delighted her more. It had been used, thought Alec, three or four times. Only once to America. Not quite enough to lose its bloom of newness.

He sat tailor-fashion on the concrete floor of the workroom, moving the flex through his hands and patiently screwing in the bulbs, careful to keep the colours in sequence. The party had been a success. Nearly all the staff from the school had attended, including Alice’s doting secretary, Mrs Dzerzhinsky. The neighbours, Judith and Donald Joy, lawyers who liked to wear white, had strolled over from their thatched cottage, the roof of which, topped by a pair of straw squirrels, could be glimpsed from various parts of Brooklands’ garden. And Osbourne was there, paper plate clutched at chest height, moving his bulk among the guests like a flightless bird – benign, myopic, faintly comical.

In a wet month they had been fortunate to have a balmy evening; real southern air that people said excitedly was like Tuscany or the Cote d’Azur. The women in summer frocks showed off their tanned arms; the men hung their jackets from the branches of the trees. Alice, tipsy on wine, slightly hoarse from too much talking, held court at the end of one of the trestle tables. Everyone knew what she had been through the previous year, events referred to as her ‘close shave’, ‘that nasty business’, or even ‘when she was away’, and they were determined to show their pity and their affection. Mozart and Rodriguez and old-time jazz played on the ghetto-blasters, and there was a barbeque, a kind of brick altar, at which Larry presided, flipping steaks and searing tuna, sometimes with Ella on his shoulders, until Kirsty, fearful that the smoke would bring on an asthma attack, had reached up to rescue her.

The first guests left around midnight; a last case of white wine was brought out from the house. The late stayers made themselves comfortable on the unmown grass. Someone fell asleep under a tree and snored contentedly. Then everything was doused in a warm rain – the lights fizzled, a fuse blew, and amid much laughter people took shelter where they could. Alec found himself under the branches of an old cherry tree with Alice, just the two of them, listening to the splashing of the rain on the leaves.

‘Promise me something,’ she said, breaking the silence between them. ‘If I get ill again you won’t let me die gaga.’

‘But you’re not going to get ill again,’ he said. ‘What are you talking about?’

She turned to look at him, though to each the other’s face was no more than a shadow, the obscure locus of a whispering voice. ‘Of course not,’ she said. ‘Anyway, I’ve spoken to Larry.’

‘Larry? What did you say to him?’ He was furious with her, but then the rain, as in Tuscany or the Côte d’Azur, ceased as suddenly as it had begun, and someone called, ‘Where’s Alice hiding? Come out, come out wherever you are!’