The Other Son Read online

  Alice wonders where Joe is now. She wonders if Joe is even still alive, wonders whether Joe went on to have the exceptional life that Alice always imagined.

  And then Alice came home one night from the soap factory, the stink of fat and lye still on her clothes, and there was Ken, leaning on the mantelpiece, fiddling with a pocket watch, looking suave. Her parents were smiling nervously up at her, being – what’s the word? – obsequious, that’s the one. Ken had seemed bright-eyed and smart in his Sunday best – he always was a snappy dresser – and he had been polite and generous towards her, even enabling, insisting, that she quit that horrible factory job. Yes, he had been nice enough, at least at the outset.

  People complain about the Muslims and what have you, complain that they arrange their marriages, that they hang people, that they still treat homosexuals badly, that they don’t give women proper rights – but it really wasn’t that long ago that all those things happened right here in Britain. People pretend to have forgotten these things because it makes them feel better, it makes them feel superior. But Alice remembers.

  So yes, Ken had been polite and well dressed and, above all in her parents’ eyes, generous. He was to inherit his father’s business. He had good prospects. He was declared to be a ‘catch’. There was no reasonable opt-out clause.

  Just after one, Ken pulls into the motorway services. They run through the drizzle and then stand in the midst of the food court to survey the various offerings, blasts of freezing air chilling their backs every time the sliding doors open.

  ‘Well, what do you fancy, love?’ Ken asks, as if choosing between these grubby little kiosks, between Burger King or Famous Fish or Señor Taco, might actually be considered a treat.

  Alice bites her lip and turns her head from side to side as she takes in the options. ‘Fish and chips might be the best option,’ she says, thinking that at least the deep-frying process will be hot enough to kill any microbes. Nothing looks very clean here.

  ‘Yes, fish and chips and mushy peas,’ Ken says, sounding almost enthusiastic. But the girl in Famous Fish is already wiping down the counters with a greasy cloth, inexplicably closing up at ten past one, so they end up with Ocean Catch menus from Burger King, which Ken declares are ‘almost the same thing’.

  But an Ocean Catch menu is not the same as fish and chips – not by a long stretch. Alice nibbles at the bun and then samples the burnt, greasy fish-finger-type thing within. She disdainfully lifts a few of the powdery fries to her lips and ponders the mysteries of British food. Because the lad in Burger King sounded a bit Italian, and the girl in Famous Fish was definitely French. They live after all on an island of green fields, surrounded by seas, encircled by European countries with fabulous cuisines. Half the people in the restaurant industry are French or Spanish or Italian or Indian, and yet the entire country has ended up opting for these American food-like synthetics. Burgers and ‘French’ fries and tacos. It really is a terrible shame.

  Alice watches Ken wolfing down his burger. He has never cared much about food, which is also a shame because once upon a time she had pretensions to being a good cook. Her pies had been to die for – everyone had said so. These days, after fifty years of indifference, of hearing Ken proudly tell people that he ‘eats to live, not the opposite’, she has abandoned any culinary aspirations. Nowadays they mostly eat ready meals. An occasional home-made cauliflower cheese or an actual cooked breakfast is about as adventurous as it gets in the Hodgetts household.

  A child on the far side of the hall starts to scream and Alice glances over and briefly remembers Matt shrieking in a shop somewhere. She scans the food hall again, taking in the true horror of its dilapidation: the chipped, grubby Formica tables, the economy light bulbs sprouting from fittings designed to take pretty spotlights that once must have cast a warm glow on fresh, shiny tables. She feels a bit like the food hall herself – tired and worn out and a bit depressed. The food hall suddenly seems like a metaphor for her life. Something that should be, that could be, that once was sparkly and appealing, but which is now chilly, grubby and worn out, lit with flickering, yellowish, cheap-to-run lighting. The whole place is beyond repair, really. It needs to be pulled down and rebuilt from scratch.

  The door opens behind her again, and she pulls her scarf more tightly around her already stiff neck. Alice isn’t getting any younger, either. She’s getting older and achier. She remembers her parents complaining about their aches and pains, remembers thinking that they exaggerated it all. But youngsters, learn this: your body really does get older. Joints actually do creak when you get up in the morning, really do seize up when you sit in a car for two hours. She knows what’s at the end of that particular tunnel. By the time you get to seventy, by the time you’ve been to as many funerals as they have, you’ve got used to that idea – you’ve had time to grasp the concept of your own mortality. But that doesn’t make it seem fair. It doesn’t mean that you necessarily feel as if you’ve lived everything you were supposed to live.

  ‘You all right?’ Ken asks.

  ‘Fine,’ Alice says. ‘Just thinking about poor Jean, really.’

  Ken nods. ‘Yeah. She’ll be in a right state,’ he says, then, pointing, ‘Are you eating those, or . . . ?’

  Alice shakes her head, smiles weakly and pushes the packet of fries across the table.

  Yes, it feels like a small life, looking back on things. Even smaller these days as the high points – the summer holidays, the days on beaches with the kids, and the dances of her youth – shrink and fade in the rear-view mirror. It’s not that she aimed high and failed, because she never expected much. She didn’t come from the kind of people who hoped for much more than enough to eat and a dry, warmish house. To her parents, even these things were incredible, unexpected achievements. So no, she had never hoped for miracles, never expected a vast Premium Bond or lottery win. But she did think that at some stage she would have a sense that there’d been some point to it all. She had thought that at some point she would be overcome by a sense of contentment, like a cat on an armchair perhaps, in the sun. She had expected to be able to stretch and yawn and look back on it all and think, ‘There, I did it! Now I can relax!’

  Perhaps her problem is that she never took the time to define what ‘it’ was. If only she had defined some goals for herself, then maybe she would feel like she had achieved them.

  Ken is clapping his hands and standing, so she wrests herself from her sombre reverie and pulls her attention back to the here and now of this day, this journey. They’re on their way to a funeral. Of course she’s feeling a bit down. Who wouldn’t?

  ‘Well,’ Ken is saying, ‘that’s put some fuel in the old furnace. Shall we make a move?’

  It’s still raining when they merge back on to the motorway. Alice thinks that she hates winter, that she truly, honestly hates it. She has always felt as if she isn’t genetically adapted to survive an English winter. Perhaps her great-great-grandparents weren’t from Russia at all, but the Middle East. Seeing as they were Jewish, it’s surely not impossible, is it? She wrinkles her nose at her own shocking lack of grasp of Jewish history. Their Jewishness wasn’t something her mother had ever wanted to discuss.

  Ken swings out to overtake a petrol tanker and has to drive through an opaque wall of spray from the tanker’s vast wheels. Alice winces until they come out the other side and vision is restored.

  She wonders how Mike felt on the night of his death. She wonders if his life flashed before his eyes as it always does in films. And if it did flash before him, she wonders if Ken featured even briefly, if it contained glimpses of their shared fifty-year careers in the tyre remould business. She wonders what his happiest memories were. His kids perhaps. His daughter has always seemed nice enough.

  Alice has had moments of contentment, too. Dozing off in a deckchair on a beach when the kids were younger, swimming in the sea with little Tim clamped to her back, shrieking in her ear with excitement . . . They went to Cornwall for a few years
in a row when Matt was a toddler. Ken had found a bargain cottage to rent, and they’d gone back every year until the owner sold it. It had felt quite traumatic not being able to go there once the cheap deal ended.

  ‘How many years did we go to Durgan?’ she asks.

  Ken looks at her and frowns. ‘Four? Five?’ he says.

  ‘That’s what I thought. Four.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘No reason. I was just remembering.’

  ‘You remember when Matt fell down those stairs?’

  Alice is surprised that Ken dares mention that day. To stop Ken looking at her, she glances out of the side window. ‘Yes,’ she says. ‘Yes, I do.’

  It had been a beautiful summer’s day, and Matt had been, what? Five? Six? Something like that. They had meandered through the higgledy-piggledy Cornish town, bought dribbling ice creams, had Coca-Colas on the seafront . . . And then they had wandered along the pier. Alice had wanted a photo, so she had asked Ken to pose with the kids, but they were on a sugar rush and had run off. And while she was looking through the viewfinder framing the stunning coastline in the background, there had come a shriek from behind her. Matt, it transpired, had run straight over the edge of a flight of stairs, had somehow failed to see them, had quite simply not stopped. He had cut his forehead, grazed his knees, split his lip and chipped a tooth.

  Secretly, because she would never dare say such a thing, Alice held Ken responsible. He had, after all, been staring straight at Matt. ‘What happened?’ she had asked him. ‘Did you see? How did he fall?’ The sun had been in his eyes, Ken said, and she was their goddamned mother, not him.

  They had held on to their anger long enough to assure themselves that no bones were broken, long enough to buy sticking plasters, and long enough to drive the howling children (Tim had joined in by that point) back to the cottage.

  And then Ken had started drinking. Matt had ‘ruined’ the day, he kept telling him. It was a waste of time trying do anything nice for any of them.

  By the time he had downed his third beer, the focus of his fury had turned on Alice.

  Those moments of contentment, those moments of relief, were so often ephemeral, so often terminated by one of Ken’s thoroughly unreasonable temper tantrums. If her life flashed before her, Alice thinks that the happy snapshots would be as rare and fleeting as the English sun that shone upon them.

  Perhaps that’s the real truth – that she just needed to live somewhere warmer. Because she has always been something of a sun-lizard, has never missed a single opportunity to turn her face to the sky and close her eyes. And all of her good memories were of moments lit by sunshine, moments eased by warmth. She remembers herself at eighteen, lying in Canon Hill Park with her head on Joe’s stomach. Some kids had been playing with a football and it had whacked Joe on the shoulder. Joe, always energetic, always full of beans, had jumped up and kicked it back across the green with surprising expertise.

  She tries to push the image from her mind. It’s amazing how tenacious lost dreams can be. Incredible, really, that such a simple memory as that, a simple memory of a sensation of uncomplicated happiness, can still haunt her fifty years later.

  ‘Look at that idiot,’ Ken says as one of those new oversized cars squeezes itself into the tiny gap between themselves and the car in front.

  ‘Everyone’s driving too fast anyway,’ Alice says pointedly.

  ‘Bloody wankers in their Porsches,’ Ken says.

  And it’s true, Alice thinks, that the people in the big expensive cars are always a bit worse than everyone else. They’re always a little more pushy. They probably consider themselves invincible in their big steel boxes.

  ‘Is that really a Porsche?’ Alice asks. She’s always thought Porsches were little sports cars designed for insecure middle-aged men with tiny todgers.

  ‘Yep, it’s basically the same car as a VW Touareg,’ Ken informs her, as if that’s supposed to mean something. ‘They’re made in the same factory.’

  ‘Right,’ Alice says. ‘Well, it’s very big – it’s like a lorry almost.’

  ‘Awful in an accident,’ Ken says. ‘It would flatten that little Panda in a pile-up.’ From the corner of his eye, he sees Alice gripping the roof handle. ‘Just relax, will you?’ he says. ‘You’re making me nervous.’

  ‘You’re just a bit close, that’s all.’

  ‘It’s not my fault if that idiot’s inserted himself bang in the middle of my braking distance.’

  ‘No, but you can still slow down. That is allowed, I believe, even when it’s not your fault.’

  Just as Alice says this, the Porsche lurches back out into the fast lane and accelerates away.

  ‘There,’ Ken says. ‘Better?’

  ‘Yes,’ Alice says, forcing herself to breathe. She looks at the little boxy car in front. It’s the same model she and Dot rented in Spain six years ago. It was such fun driving that little car around those winding Spanish roads. She had been nervous at first, of course – driving on the wrong side of the road and everything. And she had kept searching for the gearstick and the handbrake in the door pocket – that had been embarrassing. But once she had got used to it, it had been lovely. The car had a leaky exhaust pipe, too, she remembers now. It had made it sound like a sports car.

  They’d had too much fun on that holiday, really. Dot had had a fling with . . . Alice can’t remember his name now . . . Anyway, he was the father of the young man who ran the hotel bar. Now there’s a story never to be told! Imagine if Dot’s husband ever found out about that! And while Dot had been otherwise occupied with Jorge – that was his name, pronounced Hor-hey – Alice had been wined and dined by Jorge’s best friend Esteban. Esteban had not been Alice’s type at all, thank God. He had been way too hairy, way too . . . What’s that word? Ugh! It’s so annoying the way when you get older that words start to hide from you. Sometimes when she tries to explain one word, she can’t think of the other similar word either. It happens more and more with people and places, too. ‘She looks like that actress,’ Alice will tell Ken. ‘You know . . . the one who’s in that film. The film made by . . . oh, gosh . . . by that actor who’s also a film director. The one who made . . .’ And of course, she can’t then remember the film he made either. Sometimes she has to dig down three or four levels before she can start digging her way back out again.

  Anyway, Esteban had been just too hirsute, that’s the term. No one says hirsute any more. It’s strange the way words go out of fashion. Alice has always preferred clean-shaven men, and the mere thought of a hairy back has always been enough to make her shudder. Beards and moustaches look a bit sinister, don’t they? But the attention – Esteban’s attention – had been lovely. So she had let him believe. She had led him on a little. She had allowed poor Esteban to take her to dinner. And then she had pretended once she got home that the holiday had been uneventful, boring even. In fact, she had so overcompensated the misery side of things that it became impossible for her to justify going with Dot again the following year.

  Dot’s going again next summer, but to southern Spain this time, to Alicante. It’s even hotter down there, she reckons, and Alice would love to go with her. She thinks a proper holiday in the sun would do her the world of good, reckons it would ease her aches and pains, too. But how to approach it? It’s a bit like Christmas at Tim’s. She can’t work out how to organise it, how to mention it even, without sounding like she’s asking Ken for his approval. Because what if Ken says ‘no’? And he’s pretty likely to say that. He’s bound to say that they can’t afford it, or that she didn’t even enjoy it last time or something like that. Even worse would be if he decided he wanted to come along! But that’s unlikely. Ken’s not keen on foreigners.

  ‘Where’s Matt at the moment?’ Alice asks, trying to forge a bridge she can use to move the conversation towards where she’s hoping to go. ‘Is he in France or Spain?’

  ‘France,’ Ken says, ‘as far as I know.’

  ‘He was in Spain though, wasn
’t he?’

  ‘Yeah,’ Ken says, ‘he was in Madrid. But now he’s in France, down south somewhere. He’s been in France for a while.’

  ‘Dot’s off to Spain next summer.’

  ‘Dot’s off to Spain every summer.’

  ‘Maybe I’ll go with her and meet up with Matt somewhere.’

  ‘Matt’s in France,’ Ken says again, starting to sound exasperated.

  ‘They do share a border, you know, France and Spain.’

  ‘What, you’re hoping to wave to Matt from over the border?’

  ‘No . . . it’s got nothing to do with Matt really, I just . . .’

  ‘I’m not the one who brought Matt up.’

  ‘No, I was just thinking it would be nice to go to Spain again.’

  Ken shoots Alice one of his looks – a mixture of confusion and disdain.

  ‘So what do you think?’ Alice asks. ‘About Spain?’

  ‘You know what I think about Spain,’ Ken says. ‘Sweaty spics and girls with moustaches and greasy food and tap water that gives you the squits. That’s what I think of Spain.’

  ‘That’s verging on racist,’ Alice says.

  ‘It’s the truth,’ Ken says. ‘And the last time I looked, Spain wasn’t a race. It’s a nationality.’

  ‘It’s a country, actually. Spain is a country, and Spanish is the nationality of those who live there.’

  Ken blows out through pursed lips and shakes his head. ‘I can’t win with you, can I? I don’t know why I still try.’

  Alice doesn’t risk replying. She laughs lightly to defuse the tension.

  She thinks about Matt in France. She wonders what he’s doing. She wonders if he’s OK. She wonders if he’ll ever come home again.

  He’ll be working some dead-end job, cleaning or packaging sausages or waiting in a restaurant – he’s done all of these things. It’s such a waste, that’s the thing. Because, like herself, he could have done so much more.