Other Halves Read online

  “You’ll have to ask your mother,” I told him.

  “She said to ask you. She says you’re picking me up.”

  I rolled my eyes. “Then yes. I can get you on the way home. About seven?”

  Luke nodded vaguely. He was busy texting again.

  Watching Luke from the corner of my eye, I wondered for the hundredth time how much he understood about what was going on here. I wondered if he cared, worried, was losing any sleep over it. He seemed the same as ever: a happy-go-lucky eleven-year-old sliding slowly but surely into adolescence. I was impressed by his resilience.

  Luke snorted and slipped his phone into his pocket. “Billy’s such a dork,” he said, now pushing his bowl away and standing.

  “Bowl. Dishwasher,” I prompted, and Luke groaned with the physical effort of interrupting his movement, turning back to the table, and lifting the – apparently incredibly heavy – breakfast bowl from the table.

  Less than ten seconds after Luke had left the kitchen, Hannah appeared in the doorway.

  It’s not that we weren’t speaking to each other, it’s just that we were speaking the minimum number of words required to get through each day in a vaguely functional manner. And we no longer spoke to each other in front of Luke. I assumed that this rule, implicitly imposed by Hannah but respected by both of us, was in case the next conversation was the one – the moment where everything spun out of control. It was a constant possibility with potentially thermonuclear consequences.

  “Luke tells me that I’m doing both school runs today,” I said as flatly as I could manage.

  “That’s right,” Hannah replied, her features as rigid as my voice. The lack of expression expressed her mood quite succinctly. It said, “Don’t mess with me.” Her face had carried the same message every morning since we got back from our disastrous summer holiday.

  “I just thought you might ask,” I said. “I have to work late today. I’m behind with the Telma account.”

  “He can go to Billy’s after school,” Hannah replied. “He wants to anyway.”

  “I know.”

  “Then there isn’t a problem, is there?” she muttered, now staring at her feet.

  “No,” I said. “But you don’t work Wednesdays, so I would have thought . . .”

  Hannah raised her gaze and stared me in the eye. She sighed, silently, but I heard it; I felt it. “I’m busy,” she said.

  “You’re seeing him, I suppose?”

  Hannah raised one eyebrow briefly, but didn’t reply.

  “He stayed the night,” I said.

  Hannah glanced out of the side door, then looked back at me. “Is that a statement or a question, Cliff?” she asked.

  I turned my attention to the advertisement on the back of the box of Rice Krispies. Because Hannah was right – it was neither a question nor a statement. It was a reproach. And reproach wasn’t going to take me anywhere I wanted to go today.

  * * *

  I never expected this would happen. I honestly had never imagined that Hannah and I would reach this point. Maybe I just didn’t want to imagine it, because “this point” was frankly terrifying.

  Hannah had been the only woman in my life, you see. She was the only woman I was ever in love with, the only woman I had ever fancied. She was the only woman I had ever slept with, indeed the only woman I had ever wanted to sleep with. And perhaps, most of all, she was the only woman who had ever made me feel like I might, myself, be attractive, manly, loveable.

  But here we were: it was falling apart. More probably, it had already fallen apart. My brain was now starting to accept the idea that we might go our separate ways. And with hindsight, this ending had been inevitable from the very beginning. Because with hindsight, she had always been in love with someone else. Though I had lied and schemed and dissimulated to keep them apart, I was never going to manage it – not for an entire lifetime.

  If I had known, if I had had the benefit of hindsight, or foresight, or whatever it would have been called back then, would I have done anything differently? That is the question.

  Even if I had believed that Hannah would have a life of happiness with a worm like James, would I have let her head off with him? The only honest answer is, “no”.

  Because though it had all, now, so clearly fallen apart, that didn’t undo what we had had together. Hannah, and Luke were still the best things that had ever happened to me. And even with hindsight, I knew, if I were being honest, that I had never been brave enough to give that up. Or not voluntarily, at any rate.

  It was nearly seven-thirty by the time I got to Billy’s place, a tatty council house lost in a sea of other identical houses. Only the junk in each front garden and the colour of each door differentiated one house from the other.

  As I was glancing at a washing machine, dumped, rusting on the front lawn, Luke’s friend, Billy, opened the front door, turned and ran upstairs, shouting, “Luke, he’s heeeeyaaaaa!”

  Brenda, Billy’s mother, appeared in the doorway to the lounge. She walked towards me, smiling slightly, then paused six feet away and leaned against the wall. She nodded gently, and said, “Cliff.”

  “Brenda,” I replied.

  She smiled at me, then, under pretence of watching for Luke’s appearance, averted her gaze and faced the stairs instead.

  “Has he been good?” I asked.

  Brenda glanced back at me and nodded. “Fine,” she said. “I haven’t heard a peep out of them.” She blinked slowly, then asked, “So, how is everything?” and because she maintained eye contact just a second too long, I realised that she knew, or at least that she thought she knew something. Her regard, her tight-lipped smile, the silent sigh, it all added up to compassion passed generously from one disillusioned adult to another.

  “Fine,” I replied. “You know . . .”

  Brenda sighed again and nodded as if to say that, yes, she really did know, and then thankfully, Luke surged into view, swinging on the bannister and then galloping down the stairs taking them three at a time.

  “Thanks Bren’,” he said, now pushing past me and on down the path towards the car.

  I smiled and shrugged at Brenda, an unspoken apology for my son, and she did the slow blink again, somehow expressing that in the midst of everything else that was going on in her life, or my life, or perhaps life in general, the abruptness of a goodbye from an eleven-year-old was neither here nor there.

  I raised one hand and waved vaguely, then pulling the door closed on the vision of Brenda leaning – perhaps flirtatiously, perhaps not – against the door jamb, and thinking about the surprising depth of conversation we had just managed to mime, turned to follow my son towards the Mégane. As I drove away, I asked Luke, as ever fiddling with his phone, “So is Brenda a single mum?” I had never thought much about Brenda before.

  “Uh-huh,” Luke said.

  “Uh-huh yes, or uh-huh no?”

  “Yeah. Keith’s in Birmingham or something.”

  “For work, or . . . ?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Temporarily?”

  “No. They split up, like, ages ago. He stopped paying something. That’s why she had to cancel the washing machine.”

  “The mortgage?”

  A frown.

  “Child support payments?”

  “Yeah, maybe.”

  “So they don’t have a washing machine anymore?”

  When Luke didn’t answer, I glanced across at him and saw his frown lit by the pale glow from his iPhone. “Luke?”

  “Didn’t you see it?” Luke asked, incredulous now. Adolescence, it seems, makes incredulity an easily attainable state of mind.

  “The dead one, on the lawn?”

  “Well, yeah!”

  “But that doesn’t work,” I said.

  “The delivery guys were gonna take it. But she cancelled the new one so . . .”

  “And they don’t have a car to take it to the tip or whatever?”

  From the corner of my vision, I could
see that Luke was shaking his head.

  “So how does she do the washing?”

  Luke shrugged.

  “God, Luke. Could you be any less communicative? Honestly, it’s like getting blood out of a stone.”

  “I don’t get why you’re so interested in Brenda’s washing machine.”

  “It’s called conversation.”

  “OK. Whatever.”

  “So does she work?”

  “Yeah. In Asda or something.”

  I imagined poor single Brenda, working mother of two, dragging bin bags of washing to the launderette. How would she get there? Was it walking distance? Or did she have to take it on the bus? I wondered if I could buy her a washing machine. What would that cost? Two hundred quid? But no, that would be weird, wouldn’t it? She would see it as weird. You’re not allowed to get that involved in other people’s lives. My own may have been complicated, but at least we weren’t short of money. At least we didn’t have that to worry about.

  When Luke and I got home, we found James and Hannah sitting at the kitchen table: a first. Luke headed straight to his room, wisely leaving the three of us alone.

  “Hi Cliff,” James said. His voice sounded a little smug, but I was aware that I might have been projecting that.

  I didn’t look at James’ face to check; in fact I didn’t look at him once. “I think I’ll go change,” I announced to no one in particular. I then glanced at Hannah just to make clear, in case James thought I had been addressing him, that it was Hannah that I had been talking to. She had her head supported by one hand, her elbow on the table, and looked angry, or perhaps just miserable. I wondered if they had had a row. I hoped so, and it crossed my mind that this probably made me a bad person.

  Upstairs I shucked my suit, pulled on cords and a sweatshirt, then sat on the bed that used to be our bed. I glanced at the sheets and thought about who had rumpled them. I watched from the front window and soon I saw James leave.

  Back in the kitchen, I found Hannah leaning against the worktop, looking ferocious. “You could at least be civil to him,” she said.

  “Civil?” I asked, heading for the kettle, more as a distraction than from any real desire for tea.

  “Yes, there’s no need to be rude.”

  “I didn’t say a word.”

  “Well, quite. You could say ‘hello’. You could say ‘goodbye’.”

  I suppressed a sigh, swallowed hard, then replied, quietly, “Actually, I couldn’t. If I start to speak to James I’m not sure that what would come out would be hello or goodbye.”

  “It’s like having two adolescents in the house,” Hannah said.

  I forced a tight smile and, struggling to think of some witty remark that might defuse the situation, I turned to face her. But she was already leaving the room, abandoning this piece of territory to me, for now.

  “There’s some pasta bake in the oven,” she offered, over one shoulder. “If you’re hungry.”

  “Thank you.”

  “It’s just leftovers,” Hannah said, “it was going spare, so . . .”

  I peered inside the oven at the leftover remains of Hannah’s and James’ meal, and thought about her pointed explanation that this was a leftover, a spare, not a specific act of generosity created with me in mind.

  I was living in the spare room and eating leftover pasta cooked by my wife for my brother. That’s where my life was at. Like a champion chess master, James was, move by lethal move, clearing the board. And I wasn’t sure I had the stamina, or even the desire, to fight it. But then I had never been good at standing up to James.

  * * *

  I know you’re supposed to love your family. And I’m sure that it’s written somewhere that this rule applies doubly to those who have a single sibling. But the sad truth is that James was always a nightmare. And I really do mean always.

  I was just over two when James was born, so it seems almost impossible that I can remember the event, but I’m sure that I do. I’m sure I recall a couple of years of calm contentment, of being the apple of my parents’ eyes. And I’m sure I can remember a strange sensation of void entering my life once attention-grabbing James appeared on the scene.

  I have a specific vision, either remembered or since created, of holding onto the edge of his pram and listening to my mother coo and purr at him as he dribbled and pissed, and wishing, even then, that he would somehow disappear. I definitely remember coming out of a shop, hand in hand with my mother, and being disappointed that his pram was still there, feeling distraught that no one had run off with him.

  I had been a trouble-free baby and was a quiet bookish child, whereas James, right from the beginning, was a ball of energy, a bundle of nerves, and far too soon, an inexplicably solid mass of muscle.

  By five, James was breaking my toys and managing to manipulate circumstances so that I was the one who would get into trouble for it.

  By seven, he was the same height as I was, and could pin me to the ground and dribble in my eye.

  At eleven, his power over me was such that all he had to do was ask for anything and I would concede rather than have him launch into one of his reigns of terror. James’ reigns of terror (his own term) were sometimes psychological – he would organise things so that I would be punished by my parents for something I hadn’t done – or, more often physical. He would trap me in the tennis court and whack me over the head with the racket, or pin me to the floor and pinch me until I bruised, or put worms or spiders in my bed, or stick an insult on my back so that everyone at school laughed at me. His imagination was endless. I soon learned to just admit defeat rather than discover what the next terror would involve.

  By thirteen, I was doing his homework for him, and by fifteen, I was lying to my parents to cover for his night-time excursions out of the bedroom window. He was sleeping with Ruth Peterson by then – already having sex with a girl two years his senior, a girl from my own class.

  I had grown up with, grown into, all of this, and though horrific, I just took it for granted. This was my sorry lot and there was nothing I could do about it. Certainly my parents never seemed to see anything James did as unreasonable. In fact, their only response was to tell me to stand up for myself, which was absurd. I swear that from eleven onwards, even my father would have struggled to physically dominate James. But he never tried, because the type of brawny, sporty arrogance that James demonstrated was something that made my father feel proud. Quite the opposite to having a weakling son who was good at simultaneous equations, which, I think, made him feel inferior and undereducated instead.

  It wasn’t until I was in sixth-form college that it first crossed my mind that I didn’t necessarily have to let James ruin my life anymore. As my new girlfriend, Susan, my first ever girlfriend, walked off down the street with James, I had a Eureka moment. I thought, “Enough.”

  So surviving James was a challenge. But loving him was nigh on impossible.

  * * *

  The next morning, I was awakened at four by a vague rhythmic beat – the sound of a couple somewhere having sex. It could have been coming from the neighbours’ house, but it wasn’t. It was the sound of my wife being screwed by my brother. The sound was muffled, and discreet, but I could hear it all the same. Even with a pillow over my head I could hear it. I thought for a moment that I was going to throw up.

  At seven, I heard James creep downstairs and out of the front door. Neither Luke nor perhaps I myself were supposed to realise “officially” that James was staying over. But I knew Luke wasn’t fooled. I had been bracing myself for the moment when he would pop the question.

  “Can you pick up some bog roll on your way home?” Hannah asked as I reached the bottom of the stairs. She was in the process of pulling on her coat.

  “Bog roll?”

  “Yes, toilet roll. We’re out. And I won’t be coming straight home this evening, so you’ll need to pick Luke up as well.”

  I wondered if Hannah had forgotten, or was intentionally pretending to ha
ve forgotten. Whichever it was, I decided not to let her get away with it. “Today’s my birthday,” I said. “You know that, right?”

  Hannah didn’t flinch. This was clearly no surprise to her. “You’re allowed to buy bog roll even on your birthday,” she said, exercising her new bitch persona with panache.

  I stared her in the eye for a moment, watching the emotions: hatred, love, regret, determination . . . They were swirling around behind her pupils, vying for dominance. “Where’s Luke right now?” I asked. My left hand was trembling.

  Hannah nodded behind her. “He’s gone to get Peter. I’m taking them both this morning.”

  “Right. Well . . . Good. I . . .”

  “Yes?”

  I coughed. “I don’t think I can do this much longer, Han’.” I said.

  She exhaled slowly and, momentarily, sympathy became the overriding emotion I could see. Then she steeled herself, hardened herself again – I watched it happen. “Then don’t,” she said when she finally spoke.

  “Don’t?”

  “Don’t do it any longer.”

  “Meaning?”

  “I’m all out of energy too, Cliff. So if you feel you’re ready to move out, then maybe you should go for it.”

  “Move out?”

  Hannah nodded. “Sure. Rent a flat or something. Have the bachelor life you never had or whatever it is you want.”

  “You know what I want,” I said, hesitating between tears and anger.

  Hannah’s regard softened again. It was like watching her play good-cop, bad-cop single-handedly. “Look, Cliff,” she said. “This isn’t healthy. And it isn’t going anywhere. We both know that. So why not just move on?”

  I swallowed hard. “You do seem to be assuming that I’m the one to move out.”

  Hannah nodded. “Well yes.”

  “James has a place,” I pointed out. “If you want to be with him so much, then wh—”

  “It’s small,” Hannah interrupted. “And temporary. There’s no way the three of us could live there.”