The Other Son Read online

  She feels scared, too, she realises. It’s not reasonable, this sensation of fear. The fact of not getting the new house doesn’t mean that they’ll lose this one, it doesn’t mean that they’ll end up on the street, even if that’s how it feels to her. But she’s scared. Now she has imagined herself in this new house, she’s scared, irrationally scared, that it won’t happen.

  It’s a dream house, that’s the thing. It’s literally a house of dreams, a vast, overblown symbol of wealth, of security, of safety, of finally being beyond reach.

  Every time she watches an American sitcom she looks at the ridiculously big houses they all live in . . . (And how is that even possible? How can Susan the writer, who dabbles at her laptop about once every season, earn enough to pay for that house? Because Natalya knew a couple of writers when she worked in London, and they couldn’t even pay their rent. Does Mike the plumber pay for it all? Is it possible that American plumbers earn a lot of money?)

  Anyway, yes, every time she sees their mansions, their entrance halls bigger than her lounge, their shiny, happy, perfect lives (with the exception of the occasional murder) she thinks of the house. She thinks, soon this will be us. Even Susan and Mike don’t have a lap pool.

  She would feel safe in such a house. She’s sure she would feel settled and centred, and finally safe. No one is going to drag a woman lounging by a pool back to her old life, but even as she thinks this, she is visualising a man, a big-built mafia type in a badly fitting suit, dragging her by the hair from the sunlounger. Her heart starts to race.

  ‘Natalya!’ It’s Tim’s voice. He’s standing in the doorway behind her. ‘Come to bed.’

  ‘Go away!’ she says. ‘I hate you.’ She’s a little surprised at the sound of those words. They weren’t the ones she had been intending to say.

  ‘You’re a fucking lunatic sometimes, you know,’ Tim says, but his voice is soft, loving even.

  Natalya chooses to focus on the words themselves rather than the tone. The vodka has made her reactive. ‘Oh, I am lunatic?’ she says, now standing and turning to confront him, her eyes fiery. ‘And you? You are so very macho! So very clever. So very bloody everything. You decide this, you decide that. And now you think you’ll decide what I can say?’

  ‘Nat . . .’ Tim whines.

  ‘What?’

  ‘I don’t know. Stop shouting.’

  ‘Me? Shouting!’ Natalya says, though she realises that she is shouting. ‘Oh yes, Mister Putin. And perhaps you would like . . .’

  ‘You’re impossible when you’re like this,’ Tim says, interrupting her. ‘Call me when your period’s happened. I’m going to bed.’

  ‘My period?!’ Natalya says, now pursuing him down the hallway. ‘My period! Well, that’s one problem Mister Putin doesn’t have, isn’t it! Because he has such a big dick between his legs! He has his money and he decide everything. He doesn’t bleed either! Oh, Timski Putin is so fucking clever!’

  Tim stops walking away now and turns back to face his wife. She’s out of control, momentarily possessed by some demon from her past. He knows that she has these demons. He has heard her nightmares and knows that she’ll never tell him what she dreams of. And it’s probably best that way, too. Because he’s pretty sure that a beautiful, tiny, fragile Russian girl from the middle of nowhere doesn’t get to be working in the luxury hotel in London where he met her without breaking a few psychological bones along the way. He loves her, whatever she had to do to get there. He loves her, in fact, partly because of what she had to do to get there. But it’s best not to know. That’s something they both agree on.

  Right now, she’s shrieking at him and he can’t stand it. He literally can’t stand it.

  He asks her to stop. He begs her to stop. He needs her to understand his need for her to stop.

  But it’s like being King Canute facing the tide. Because Natalya’s anger is like a breaker, rising from the calm flat of the ocean into a huge terrifying swell and then racing towards the shore. And the only way to deal with it, like a swimmer before a tsunami, is to attempt to bob over the top, to hope it will crash on a beach behind you.

  But the kids are upstairs. That’s what Tim can’t stand. The kids are upstairs, and they’ll be listening to all of this. And he can’t let that happen.

  Without thinking, acting out of animal instinct, he physically pushes her, still raging, back into the kitchen. He closes the door behind him. He sees her fear at the gesture, sees that she has misinterpreted it as something far more sinister than him simply wanting to spare the boys her absurd screaming.

  And now he’s lost in his memories, lost in a different set of screams in a different house, even as Natalya’s flailing arms start to slap at him ineffectually, even as she exhausts her vocabulary of English swear words and switches again to angry, incomprehensible Russian.

  He is remembering being at the top of the stairs, looking down. He is remembering watching Ken slapping Alice, remembering trying to come up with some strategy whereby a small boy like him – for how old had he been, eight perhaps? – might intervene should that become necessary. He remembers grasping for any little idea that might stop the raging bull that was Ken on a roll.

  He’s remembering the terror as Ken glanced up and caught sight of him there, peeping through the banisters, remembering running, his heart racing, back upstairs to his room, plugging his ears against the screams with his fingers, wondering if his mother, his beautiful, gentle mother, would still be alive by morning. They haunt you forever, those childhood memories. You run them and rerun them until you’re not even sure they happened any more. Except that they did happen. They really did.

  Natalya asks him about his nightmares, but he can’t tell her because they contain nothing concrete. They’re just the sensation of fear, just the feeling of wondering if Ken’s drunken anger will result in his mother being hit – or worse, being killed – or whether instead the terrifying wave of madness will come crashing up the stairs into their bedrooms, into their safe space. Whether, no longer safe, he or Matt will get ripped from the bed. Because they – Matt, Alice, himself – were the beach Ken’s anger always crashed upon. They were the only way it ever dissipated.

  And so he dreams of that feeling, that apprehension, that fear . . . He dreams of the guilt, too, the guilt of hoping, of actually praying that this time it might be Matt’s turn, that this time it might just be Alice. As long as he doesn’t kill her. Please don’t let her die. Because what would they do then?

  So he doesn’t want his kids to grow up with that, he really doesn’t.

  Right now, Natalya is leaning over him. She’s stroking his hair and speaking softly, saying his name, and he, Timski, a child again, is wincing at her touch. He’s crying, he realises. He’s crouched down against the kitchen door, and he’s weeping. And Natalya, thank God, has stopped.

  Natalya ends up tearful too, so they hug each other and cry together on the kitchen floor. Neither asks the other exactly what their tears are about. They would both have trouble explaining anyway.

  When the crying is over and Natalya is feeling silly about her shouting and Tim is feeling embarrassed about his crying – once Tim has blown his nose and declared that he isn’t going to buy the bloody house anyway, and Natalya has summoned every modicum of self-control she possesses to tell him that it doesn’t matter, that she doesn’t care, that this, each other, is all they need – they end up hugging on the sofa. The hugging leads to nuzzling and the nuzzling leads to kissing, and soon enough Tim’s getting hard and Natalya is wriggling out of her jeans.

  And then he’s half-naked on his back, his own jeans around his knees, and Natalya is sliding over him, pulling him inside her. She’s bouncing like a kid on a space hopper and pinching his nipples, and none of it matters, because this, this sliding and slipping, this tingling in his spine, this ecstatic animal thrusting, really is all they need.

  Natalya pulls off her top and throws it over the back of the sofa and Tim reaches behind her an
d unclips her bra releasing her breasts and, yes, Natalya is amazing, because on top of everything else, on top of being a great mother, and a good cook and a great friend (most of the time), she really does fuck like a porn star (and where did she learn to do that?).

  Tim pushes the thought from his mind because who cares where she learnt it – it’s brilliant, it’s amazing! She’s the best lay he’s ever had, and fucking Natalya (yes, ‘fucking’, because though they do sometimes ‘make love’, that’s really not what’s happening right now) makes him feel like a porn star too, and it’s all rising within him, the electrical charge increasing, the fragility, the fears, his childhood, poor Alice, that bastard Ken . . . all receding, and his mojo is returning and he’s himself again, he’s broken free from it all and he’s the wildly successful banker he decided to be, he’s the man who does multi-billion-dollar deals, he’s the father who takes his family to firework displays, he’s the husband who pays for everything. And on top of all of this, he’s just momentarily a porn star. He’s a master of the fucking universe and his wife is simply . . . God, her beauty, her body, the joy of being inside her . . . it’s beyond words.

  And he’s getting there now, it’s rising within him and Natalya is almost there too, and he wishes he could hold it longer, because it’s so good, this making it last, and yet it’s so good to just let it happen too, such a relief to allow this different wave to envelop them, to feel it wash over them and crash on a different, sunnier beach, and all that anger, all that fear will be magically transformed into sweaty, glorious deliverance.

  But Natalya has stopped dead. He tries for an instant to continue to writhe beneath her but she locks him in with her knees so he can’t move a muscle. She grabs her sweater and uses it to hide her breasts.

  ‘Go to bed!’ she shrieks, causing Tim to look up behind him to where little Boris is peering through the banisters at them.

  ‘Fuck!’ he mutters.

  ‘Go to bed!’ Natalya shouts again, now rolling away and grabbing cushions with which to make a wall she can hide behind. Boris peeping through the banisters is reminding her, shockingly, of the punters in the peep shows. ‘GO TO BED!’

  But Boris isn’t moving. He’s still there, his little pale fingers gripping the banisters, his tiny face poking between them. His expression looks glassy, neutral. He could even be asleep.

  Tim stands, pushes his semi-erect dick back into his jeans and buttons them up. ‘It’s all right, buddy,’ he says as he crosses the room, but it’s not really all right at all because Boris has ruined his porn-star moment and Natalya is lapsing back into semi-madness.

  ‘Don’t stare at me, Boris!’ she’s shouting. ‘Go to bed! Tim, make him stop stare. Is creepy!’

  ‘Mum and Dad were just playing,’ Tim says reassuringly as he climbs the stairs. To Natalya, now muttering unnervingly in Russian, he casts a, ‘Button it, Nat, for Christ’s sake!’

  When he reaches the landing, Boris looks up at him and blinks confusedly, and Tim still can’t tell if he’s sleepwalking or in shock at what he’s just seen. He waves a hand in front of Boris’s eyes. It’s what they do in films to find out if people are conscious or not, but right now it reveals nothing.

  ‘Did you have a nightmare?’ he asks as he lifts the boy into his arms. As he carries him back to his bed, he feels the full weight of guilt for this dishonesty. It’s exactly what his mother used to say to him when he was Boris’s age, and often enough he had chosen to believe her. The idea of a bad dream had seemed at the time to be so much easier to live with than the truth.

  6

  APRIL

  ‘Shall I put these in boxes or bags?’ the guy asks. He’s standing in the doorway to the bedroom holding a pile of sheets from the airing cupboard. He’s irritatingly good-looking and slightly more muscular than the average superhero.

  Tim’s generally fairly proud of his body – he has worked hard to avoid a paunch – but being around this guy, specifically having this guy peering in at him when he’s in the process of getting dressed, makes him feel insecure. He has already decided as soon as this move is over to up his hours at the gym.

  Natalya has spotted Steve’s muscles too. (Yes, Tim remembers now: the guy’s name is Steve.) She’s all flirtatious and girly whenever she’s around him, which makes Tim’s comparative lack of musculature even harder to bear.

  Tim pulls a shirt from the wardrobe and starts to button it. ‘I don’t know,’ he replies, irritated more by the guy’s Californian-surfer head of hair and his pecs than by his question. ‘Ask my wife.’

  Steve nods thoughtfully. His regard seems to hover just a fraction too long over Tim’s chest as he rushes to hide it beneath the blue cotton shirt.

  So he’s gay, Tim thinks. Figures. The gay guys are always more built than everyone else. But then the hours that Tim spends taking Boris and Alex to funfairs, the gay guys get to spend at the gym. No wonder they’re ripped.

  ‘She’s not . . . um . . . that clear, this morning,’ Steve says, vaguely smiling, seemingly unaware of any danger in what he’s saying. But even if Tim knows exactly what Steve is hinting at, Steve has misjudged the situation. This is not that moment when Tim and Steve bond over the state of Tim’s dippy, hungover wife.

  ‘I don’t know what the fuck that’s supposed to mean,’ Tim says, watching with a certain pleasure as the smile slips from Steve’s lips.

  ‘Sorry,’ Steve says. ‘I just . . . I didn’t mean anything really.’

  And suddenly, the guy whose muscles are so big that he doesn’t seem able to walk naturally looks like he might cry, and a vision of Steve as a small, spotty, bullied child flashes into Tim’s mind. He doesn’t know where the vision comes from – some shared pool of consciousness perhaps – but he understands now how young Steve is, how recent those terrified walks home from school were, and he understands and forgives Steve’s musculature for what it is: a defence shield, and not a very good one at that.

  ‘Look,’ Tim says, his voice softening. ‘You’re the packing expert, OK? And my wife’s the boss in all of this. And they’re sheets – they’re just sheets. So pack them any way you want, OK, dude?’

  Steve nods. ‘Bags are best, I reckon,’ he says.

  ‘Bags it is then,’ Tim agrees. He grabs his shoes and squeezes through the small gap Steve provides by stepping only partially aside. He’s happy to escape the strange intensity of the guy. He’ll break with routine and put them on downstairs.

  In the living room, another, older man with another instantly forgettable shortened name, Burt or Mike or Joe, is busy loading Tim’s CD collection into boxes.

  ‘Careful with those,’ Tim says, for no reason except that he can. ‘Some of those are collectibles.’

  ‘Oh, we’re careful with everything, sir,’ Burt/Mike/Joe says. ‘We go on special training sessions. It’s written in our company motto and everything.’

  Tim suspects that he’s meant to enquire what the company motto is, but a) he isn’t in the mood to chat to the guy, and b) he isn’t interested anyway, and c) he suspects that he’s already seen it on the side of their lorry and like Burt/Mike/Joe’s name, has already allowed himself to forget it.

  In the kitchen, he finds Natalya having what she calls her Russian Breakfast – alternating between sips of Bloody Mary, strong gritty coffee, and drags on a cigarette.

  ‘You OK?’ Tim asks, lifting the vodka bottle from the table and placing it out of view in a half-packed carton on the counter. ‘It’s a bit early for vodka, dontcha think?’

  ‘But is so stressful, Timski,’ Natalya says. ‘I read it in a magazine.’

  ‘You read what?’

  ‘That the move is as stressful as losing partner in car accident. Someone measure it.’

  Tim nods blankly. He tries not to feel insulted by the comparison. ‘Well, thanks!’ he says. But Natalya doesn’t spot his irony.

  Yet Tim knows what she means. It is stressful. Tim too has had a tightness across the chest for days, an occasional in
ability to breathe smoothly. Even Boris and Alex are unusually wired at the moment, are waking up with nightmares at night.

  And despite the moving company’s motto – it comes to him now: ‘Every Item As Safe As Houses’ – things do get broken. Not the big expensive replaceable things, but the little worthless family heirlooms.

  It wasn’t Steve’s fault though. There was no way he could know (unless Natalya had told him – which she hadn’t) that if you took everything off one end of that glass shelf, it would tip up. Only Natalya could have foreseen that, but she had been upstairs, sleeping off yesterday’s Russian Breakfast.

  ‘I’m so tired, Tim,’ she says now. ‘I’m so glad when this is all done.’

  Tim has been working eleven-hour days trying to close the deals that will pay for the bridging loan, the deals that will pay for the Safe As Houses moving company, the Dash of Flash interior designer, and the Spic and Span industrial cleaners who are due to swoop in behind them once they’ve left. And he has dedicated his weekends to driving around with Natalya to look at furniture, to taking the kids to the park while she sleeps, to feeding them while she drinks . . . And yet despite all of this, despite the fact that she has a virtual army of people at her beck and call to clean, move, decorate and furnish, he has to listen, on top of everything else, to her complaining about how fucking tired she is.

  Perhaps he’s just tired, too. Yes, he’s tired and it’s making him irritable, which isn’t helping things. And it really shouldn’t come as a surprise that the process of moving house is exhausting. As Natalya says, it’s well known to be as stressful as having your husband drop dead.

  But he is surprised. His vision, the vision he had of this house did not include the moving process, did not include the thousands of little tiring, irritating, personal-space-invading details. It did not include being cruised by tearful Steve, or the glass shelf that would inevitably crash down on Natalya’s grandmother’s Babushka doll. Just as picnics in films never feature those bastard red ants biting everyone’s ankles, and just as sexy pool scenes are never interrupted by those horrifically carnivorous horseflies, his vision of moving house had been carefully edited to exclude specifically anything to do with actually moving house. But here they are. And it’s more nightmare than dream sequence.