‘So,’ he replied.
The programme ended. They watched the credits roll. They watched the adverts. They watched another programme start. He thought of Amy at work, over whom he’d infatuated for years. She had put her hand on his leg once. ‘Can I?’ she’d asked. He saw again her slender fingers, her thighs beneath black tights. He’d put his hand over hers. It was his left hand. Orange light and shadow swept over his wedding band. He’d grasped her hand and placed it back gently on the table before walking resentfully to the door.
‘Where’s your phone tonight?’ he asked Beth.
‘Oh,’ she said. ‘I must have left it upstairs.’
‘You never normally leave it anywhere.’
‘I guess I’m full of surprises.’
Again she looked at him. Again he shied from her gaze. So meek a response. It appalled him. He wondered how his body had known to act in such a shameful way, even before he’d realised he was ashamed?
‘I’ve got to work tomorrow,’ he said.
‘But tomorrow is Saturday.’
‘I know. We’ve all been called in. At least you can have some quality mother-daughter time.’
‘Ruby has that party at lunchtime,’ she said, knowing the venue was less than a mile from the hotel. She didn’t believe in fate. Everything is personal choice.
‘You should go,’ Tim said.
‘Maybe I will.’
That afternoon Ruby had told him about a nightmare she’d had. They’d been on a canoe, just the two of them. They’d paddled out into the middle of a lake and without warning he had plopped over the side and into the water. She had laughed at him as he floated beside her, just out of reach. He’d taken a deep breath then and slid beneath the surface. A moment later she heard him tapping the bottom of the fibreglass, tap-tap, tap-tap, before emerging on the other side, spurting water out of his mouth. Over and over he did this, each time tapping the underside of the canoe as he passed beneath it. Under he went again. A moment passed. Then another. She waited excitedly. She wasn’t afraid. She trusted him. She began to look around to see where he might reappear. She took a deep breath and held it for as long as she could. She took another deep breath and did the same thing again. Still he’d not surfaced. Eventually she leant over and dipped her face into the water to try and find him. In front of her eyes tiny particles floated about in a brown, silent world. Beyond that, even just a foot beyond that, she saw nothing at all. She sat back up in the canoe. He wasn’t there. The water all around her was flat and unbroken. That’s when the terror came.
‘It’s just a dream,’ Tim told her, ‘I’ll always be here for you.’ It had seemed such an obvious thing to say then, and such an easy promise to fulfil.
Another programme was ending, another starting. The remote control was discarded between them. Neither had moved to pick it up. So much to say, but really there was nothing to be said. He stood up, dared to look at her finally.
‘Just don’t make a fool of me, Beth.’
She didn’t even pretend to be surprised. ‘Where’s your famous rage now?’ she asked.
‘I’m going to bed.’
CHAPTER ELEVEN
The small child was hanging by tiny fingers. Below her, the ground seemed an awful long way away. Her wriggling kicked off a shoe and she watched it fall and bounce before coming to a rest. She looked up at her hands. They slipped a notch but held on. Behind her, her father’s back was turned. She wasn’t scared. He had said he would always be there for her. He had arrived over her bed earlier that morning, almost before it was morning, just as she hoped he would, when her wailing had filled up the house. It wasn’t always him that came, but often it was.
‘You’re a hard taskmaster,’ he said, but not angrily, and had lifted her out of bed and carried her downstairs.
Now they were in the park. She loved him bringing her here. He let her do things her mother didn’t. ‘Go on,’ he’d encouraged, ‘water won’t kill you,’ and she’d splashed down the slide, leaving behind her a trail through the condensation. It had made her leggings wet and the cold air against them as she whooshed back and forth on the swing made her shiver.
One thing her father didn’t let her do was what she had started doing a minute ago. But he hadn’t been watching then. That other man had started talking to him and he’d gone over to where he was standing. She had sat down on the hump of a tyre at the foot of the slide and waited for him to finish, but he’d taken too long and she’d grown bored – bored and jealous. She got up and crossed the playground unnoticed. The metal stairs of the climbing frame were slippery with dew. They had lines on them, short lines pointing in all directions. They stuck up in a way that made her think of her grandad’s tummy after his operation. She held the handrails tightly and put her feet down carefully, climbing all the way to the top platform before looking back at her father. He still wasn’t paying her any attention. In front of her the monkey bars crossed the gap like a fallen ladder, like a dare. She put one hand on the first rung, and then the other. Ruby took a big gulp of air and then swung off the ledge.
Ben had a habit of being nostalgic for things that were not yet over. He would catch himself doing it, yearning for moments he was still living through, or for places where he still was, but although he recognised this flaw in himself he was, nevertheless, unable to commit fully to the present. He was in the park. He was dressed in his running shorts and shoes but was not running. He had taken a few tentative strides when he’d first arrived, given up irritably, and was now sitting atop one of the small rises. He wondered why he was refusing to run, if it was some sort of statement to self, an attempt to reinforce the promise he’d made and to turn it from a grand, chivalrous gesture (God, is that what it was!) into a physical act, a fact that couldn’t then be unfacted. He hadn’t slept the previous night, after the club and the field and Madeline’s odd revelations and his own unbidden, unexpected oath. ‘I’m not going.’ He’d heard himself saying these words.
He had lain in bed watching objects appear in his room as the light filtered in. There was the bookshelf, there the poster with the dog-eared corner, there – if he rolled onto his side – the letter in a tight ball beneath the desk. When he could stand it no longer he’d dressed and let muscle memory bring him back here. He leant back on his hands and looked about him, taking in the scene as if it were already a memory. There are places, ordinary places, that take on such significance when we’re growing up, that resonate through the rest of our lives. Oftentimes it’s only in hindsight we recognise them, but Ben knew already that this patch of communal land would always be with him. He looked at the overgrown tennis court with holes in the wire mesh fence, at the line of trees. Behind him, he knew, was the playground where he met her.
She was quite proud of how long she’d been holding on. It must have been as long as it took Mummy to make her dinner, and definitely longer than it took her to eat it. But her hands were hurting now. She had expected Daddy to have appeared already, grabbing her around her legs and pulling her away to safety, patting her bottom and calling her silly names. But he hadn’t come. If she could have, she’d have turned her head to see where he was – what did grown-ups talk about? – but her stretched arms squashed her ears and pinned her face to the front. She could’ve called out, but that wasn’t part of the game, it wasn’t in the rules. She began quietly to count to ten. One. Two. She’d fallen off the bed once and bumped her head, but not very badly; the bed wasn’t high and there was a big, fluffy rug on the floor beneath it. She thought this was probably as high as ten beds though. Three. Four.
Ben was surprised to see two figures already in the playground. He’d expected it to be empty at this time of the morning. He watched them for a while. They were on the swings. One of them got off and ran, tottered, to the slide. He stood up and began walking towards them. Halfway there he recognised the larger figure as the slogger he had seen here before. It was something in his gait, that same shuffling motion. He arrived at the low railings and stood there watching. Almost immediately the slogger stopped playing with the child.
‘You need to lift your knees,’ Ben called, almost surprising himself.
‘What’s that?’
‘When you run. You drag your legs from your hips.’
The man looked down his body. His hips moved ever so slightly as he imagined himself doing it. He looked up. ‘You’re right.’ He patted his thighs through his jeans. ‘But my legs are heavy these days. It’s easier to shuffle.’
‘No, it just seems easier. It’s not actually a very economical motion. It makes your legs go out to the side, and anything not moving forwards or backwards is wasted energy. Also, you increase your chances of injury.’
Behind the man his daughter – Ben assumed she was his daughter – had sat down by the slide and was watching them with a scowl. She was wearing pink leggings and a white jumper. She looked tiny compared to the big metal things around her.
‘I’m already one big injury,’ the man said. He was walking towards Ben. Even when he walked he dragged his legs, particularly his left one. It pulled his shoulder down slightly with each step, and Ben imagined he could see the bands, tight and short, resisting in their sockets. There were stretching exercises he could think of that would help. Suddenly the man stopped walking. ‘It’s you,’ he said. Something passed behind his eyes. ‘From the other morning. I didn’t recognise you from back there, without my glasses.’
Ruby was very angry at her father. She was looking forward to letting go. She hoped she would hurt herself a lot, or at least enough to leave a bruise and a nasty graze. He would get in trouble with Mummy then. Even if it didn’t hurt very much she would act like it did. Five. Six. Seven.
The man was talking to Ben about his numerous aches and pains. He looked tired. Old and tired. There was sleep in the corner of his eye and he kept yawning. It made Ben want to yawn as well but he bit down on it. Every time the man yawned Ben could see where his teeth were brown. ‘But it’s lovely this time of morning,’ he was saying. Is this, Ben wondered, what growing up does to you? He felt full of something. He didn’t know what it was or how to express it. He wanted, even in a small way, to make this man’s life a little easier. He looked down and was surprised to see that he was stretching, pulling his heels up behind him and leaning one way and then the other. He stopped. He didn’t want the man to think he was in some way mocking him. He would tell him about those stretches. They would help. He waited for a chance to speak. What was he saying now? He was telling him about his wife, who was at home in bed. He was saying that she needed her sleep and that, anyway, as he’d mentioned, he liked this time of day really. He dabbed a finger at the gluey ball of sleep but succeeded only in shifting it from his eye to the bridge of his nose.
‘Everyone hates my girlfriend,’ Ben said suddenly.
‘Oh,’ the man said, surprised.
‘Especially my parents.’
