Relative Strangers Page 8
He could hear voices in the hall. The high-pitched shout of effusive greeting. More arrivals. Abruptly (or mercifully) he terminated the angst-ridden hysterics of Tripwire and substituted them with the vicious expletives of Jugular Vein. On the screen before him a khaki-clad body twitched as Rob pumped semi-automatic machine gun rounds into it; a blooming rose of blood spread across its chest but the falsetto cries of agony were drowned out by the obscenities spilling from the lips of Jugular Vein’s lead singer. Or perhaps they were the soldier’s words. It was all one to Rob.
A hand on his shoulder alerted him to the fact that there was someone else in the room. He turned his head. Behind him was a tall man with long grey hair tied back into a pony tail, an off-white T shirt and a home-made tattoo across his left bicep enquiring ‘Why me?’ The man’s eyes were deeply set and told a tale of too many late nights, his skin was aged by the sun, lined, his chin unshaven. The hand on Rob’s shoulder had long, artistic fingers and immaculately manicured but unusually long nails and the skin between the index and third fingers was rimed with the nicotine of years. He was, in this room, in this house, like Rob, an anachronism. He didn’t belong, he didn’t want to belong. He lived life in another lane altogether but had come, under sufferance. Between the two of them there was a zest of communication - unspoken, and yet, to Rob, tangible and surprisingly eloquent. In spite of himself Rob smiled. Then he nodded a greeting to his Uncle Jude; words were impossible in the din from Jugular Vein and, in any case, quite unnecessary.
‘Fuck you pissing wank-head!’ shrieked Jugular Vein’s lead singer.
Jude nodded back. ‘Cool,’ he mouthed.
✽✽✽
Out in the hall there had been delighted greeting; hugs and kisses. Heather was the baby of the family and used to being adored by everyone. Having brought with her at last the child she had longed for she expected, and indeed received, special recognition, and was now deeply immersed in the role of parent that she had watched her sisters and brother play in turn. Now she was one of them, an equal; the production of a child, regardless of the method, proved her worth, her womanhood. The fact that she had married a celebrity, rubbed shoulders on a daily basis with personalities from the music business, was regularly featured on the pages of glossy magazines and had, through her husband, more money than the rest of them put together, none of this counted in her own mind as an achievement compared to theirs of having produced children. Now she glowed, satisfied at last; they could not consider her to be the baby any longer. Busily, like a real grown-up, she was supervising the unloading of baby paraphernalia. Of the new child herself there was, as yet, no sign. Toys of every shape and size and description, brightly coloured, with multi-textured surfaces to explore and bristling with knobs to press and dials to turn, emitting noises to surprise and delight. Houses and cars, ironing boards and kitchens, tool boxes and construction toys, dressing up clothes and musical instruments, crayons and easels and ride-on toys and teddy bears; an entire toy shop disgorged itself into the hall, James and Ben and Les running in and out with armfuls of bags and boxes.
Heather picked through the stock, muttering, ‘There was one teddy bear she seemed to particularly like, a blue one, I think.’
Robert, passing through on Mary’s arm on his way to the kitchen where everyone had been summoned to eat, caught sight of his favourite. His face expressed recognition for the first time. He beamed, and opened his arms.
‘Oh! Daddy,’ Heather said, going to him and being enfolded. ‘How lovely! Hello, Mummy.’ She managed to reach a hand out from the embrace and include Mary. ‘I’ve brought you a new granddaughter. You’ll see her soon. She’s a gift from the spirits, a changeling child; I had to rescue her from the depths.’ Robert nodded sagely as though this gibberish made perfect sense to him. The child he loved had been usurped by this ethereal being with weird enthusiasms and quasi-religious tendencies, yet the sweet face and golden hair was the same. The girlish form in his arms could have been the fifteen, or ten, or five year old he remembered. She was still his little girl. Now he understood there was another just like her, a golden child, much desired and sought for. A new McKay.
Elliot cantered down the stairs. He seemed to have washed away every vestige of bad temper. He was smiling and relaxed - the epitome of the genial host.
‘This is marvellous!’ he exclaimed, putting his left arm around Heather and reaching his right towards Jude for a manly handshake. ‘Welcome. Welcome. Where is the little one?’ He managed to ask as though the arrival of the new family member had been uppermost in his mind all day whereas in fact only the toys and baby things had reminded him of it.
‘She’s sleeping, in the car.’ Heather said, disengaging herself from her father and Elliot alike. ‘Mitch will watch her until after dinner, then we’ll bring her in. To be honest,’ Heather passed a hand with self-conscious weariness over her eyes, ‘she hasn’t been sleeping that well. Now she’s gone off, it seemed best to leave her for a good long sleep.’
Belinda, flushed from the kitchen, pushed open the baize door to announce, ‘Dinner is served.’
‘Shouldn’t we wait for Simon?’ Mary asked.
Belinda shrugged. ‘They’re an hour late already. I just can’t hold this back any longer.’
‘They’ll probably have eaten, anyway,’ Heather said. ‘Miriam’s very strict about routine.’
‘The ladies ought to have a gentleman to take them down, that’s the tradition!’ cried Ruth, but instantly regretted it. Her tongue felt like it had doubled in size and couldn’t adequately get itself round her teeth to form the words. Elliot, eager, now that he had made a new start, to enter into the spirit of things, gallantly offered June his arm. ‘You’ll have to show me where to go,’ he said, good-naturedly. I haven’t had the tour, yet.’ June almost crowed in triumph as she took her place at the head of the line. The others followed behind them down the passageway towards the kitchen.
Jude stepped back into the study where Jugular Vein had completed a paroxysm of blood-curdling profanities with what sounded like a mass suicide pact on the part of the band members and their live audience. The silence of the aftermath was deafening. ‘Dude!’ he said, cocking his head in the direction the others had followed, ‘grub!’ Rob swivelled round in his chair. He had resolved to refuse all sustenance but he could probably be more of a nuisance by joining the meal than by boycotting it. Plus, the promise of Uncle Jude’s companionship for this holiday suddenly let in just a glimmer of light. He got up and followed Jude into the hall but finding Mitch there busy making order out of chaos, made his mood plummet once more.
He had forgotten about Mitch.
Mitch was hardly more than a year older than Rob but even the small advantage that so few months might have given him should have been more than compensated for by the vast discrepancy between their social and material situations. Rob had been raised in a stable home and had known the security of money and a solid middle class up-bringing for as long as he could remember. Mitch’s home life – what he could remember of it, or, at least, what he chose to reveal – had been chaotic; he had been taken away from an abusive father and a drug-dealing mother to stay in a succession of foster and children’s homes. Rob’s education had been the best that money could buy and his future – never actually voiced but tacitly understood by everyone – was already secure in McKay’s Haulage. Mitch’s formal education had been, to say the best of it, somewhat piecemeal, disrupted as it had been by frequent moves between schools as well as an early habit of truancy. His future, therefore, had seemed correspondingly inauspicious. Rob was a McKay, a family which enjoyed a high profile in the town as a large employer, patron of various local charities and the regular funder of key Borough events. The McKay mantle of respectability would always shroud him. Under its shade, by dint of his mother’s tireless charity work and his father’s role as Worshipful Master, not to mention respect for his grandfather’s stainless reputation, he would be forgiven much of the youthful waywa
rdness to which teenage boys are prone. Mitch had no such protection. He was nobody, and had consequently been exposed to the full force of the law for relatively minor infractions; he had spent time in a Youth Detention unit and even, whilst on remand, in prison. But somehow, far from tipping the balance against him these disparities had served to enhance Mitch’s aura and, fight it as he might, Rob found himself unnervingly in awe of him.
While Rob himself was forever caught up in a maelstrom of angry resentments and violent impulses, helplessly buffeted by their storm, Mitch had, as Rob termed it, ‘got it together’. He seemed to stand at the still, peaceful eye, rock-solid, immune to the hormonal angst, the raging blood of youth. The struggles of his life had honed him of his boyhood. Rob on the other hand was still hugely encumbered by his. He floundered between the unreasonable restrictions imposed by his father and school, the expectations of the family and the unwieldy freedoms of unearned privileges granted by his mother in an attempt to over-compensate both. Constantly railing against the one and proving himself unworthy of the others, Rob found himself treated as a spoilt, immature, unreliable and moody brat whilst Mitch was accorded a quiet, polite respect surely out of all proportion to his true status.
Rob recalled the first time they had met. Mitch had been present at some family gathering or another, hovering in the background, operating as a very lowly factotum, expected to undertake any manner of menial task. He had been finding his feet in his new and unbelievably cushy situation. He had had the look of some wild creature in sudden captivity, a watching wariness, an astonished defensiveness. Rob, even though younger, had looked down upon him with withering scorn and in order to demonstrate the distance between them, had deliberately spilled a drink so that he could watch Mitch clean it up.
Mitch had come under Jude’s wing by means of the Prince’s Trust, a charity case, a bad lad with a last opportunity to turn good, another in a longish line of lame ducks that Jude and Heather were in the habit of taking on. Sooner or later the lame ducks usually debunked, often with a bag of swag. Rob had heard his father scoff at Jude and Heather as ‘easy meat’ and had not supposed that Mitch would last long. But it had soon become clear that Mitch would be more than just a temporary fixture; he had settled; he had adapted. He was quiet, utterly unassuming without at all falling into subservience. He made himself useful in a hundred small but important ways, but it was impossible to belittle him. It seemed that he had only been waiting for someone to give him an opportunity and in Jude and Heather’s rather chaotic, unregulated life there were opportunities aplenty for timely, discreet, watchful intercession. He had, ‘wormed his way in’, (as Rob thought of it) both at home and in Jude’s music production company, earning, from everyone, a respect untainted by patronage. It was amazing, Rob railed to himself, when you thought about it. Who was he anyway? Nobody! A charity-case, a lad off the streets, penniless and unconnected.
The two lads exchanged a wary nod as they faced each other across the hall. The door stood open onto the night. The hall fire was almost out and Jude tossed a log onto the embers, before kneeling down and lighting a cigarette from one of them. He took an enormous, needy lungful and blew the smoke up the chimney before offering the cigarette to Rob. Taken by surprise, Rob shook his head, then regretted it, as Jude turned to Mitch and passed the cigarette to him.
‘Mitch, mate, keep an ear open, will you?’ he said, cocking his head at the open doorway.
‘Course,’ Mitch replied.
Jude made for the baize door, and Rob followed him.
‘Brought a guitar and amp with me,’ said Jude. ‘Want to wire them up for me, later? Jam a bit?’
‘Cool,’ said Rob, sullenly.
✽✽✽
Belinda had lit candles and placed them the length of the refectory table. There was wine and jugs of water and tureens of vegetables. The light flickered, diffused by the glassware and silver, glinting warmly off the copper pans which hung from one of the low beams. The red enamelled Aga glowed like a furnace in the half-light. The room was filled with the smell of good food and the approaching chatter of happy and excited voices as the family made its way down the corridor. Belinda, in a flowered apron, leant contentedly against the dresser and waited for them to come. It was a shame about Simon, she thought, though typical of him to make a late entrance. But it couldn’t be helped. The meal was cooked and she was ready. Family is food, and here was the beginning of it all. Food at a table, the sustenance of common genes and the reinforcing of the cords which bound them; family was flesh and bone and must be built up in body, it was strength in numbers and strength grew from feeding. The kitchen would be her powerhouse, her own domain. From here she would stoke the family boilers and nobody, not even Elliot, would beard her here. The alarm bell that Elliot had rung upstairs had not been rung in vain. She would not allow herself to leave him behind again, not from any desire to gratify him, or from any sense of guilt; it was a purely defensive strategy.
Elliot was the first to enter the room. He took a cursory look around the room but no word of compliment could be drawn from him.
‘Where would you like to sit, darling?’ Belinda asked, pushing herself away from the dresser and going towards him.
‘Oh, anywhere at all, but next to June,’ Elliot put his hand unnecessarily over June’s where it was slipped into the crook of his arm. It was pure devilry in him; a deliberately hurtful gesture. Belinda pretended not to have seen.
‘What about here, then?’ she indicated the carver at the top of the table. Without another word Elliot seated himself in it, and, placing June on his right, began assiduously filling her wine glass for her. The rest of the family filled up the seats around the table. Last of all, Jude and Rob ambled into the kitchen and took up a space between June and Rachel. June made an involuntary lurch away from her long-haired nephew-in-law. She knew he was reputed to have millions and she couldn’t dispute his celebrity status – his rock band WillyNilly had been huge in the 70’s – but he looked for all the world to her like the kind of man one saw lurking under viaducts or rummaging in the bins behind expensive City restaurants. He was the last dinner companion she would have chosen from the whole clan.
Rachel, on the other hand, was flustered by the proximity of her cousin Rob. He had grown in height since she had last seen him and developed broad shoulders and the shadow of dark down on his upper lip. He wore a black T shirt bearing the grinning visage of some grotesque death-head, black lace bracelets and one earring. His hair, as dark as Ellie’s, was spiked into points so that he bore a permanent air of untamed savagery. He was very, very handsome. She hadn’t seen him for two years; Rob had been absent on a school skiing trip when they had last visited Aunty Belinda’s two Easters ago so it must have been at poor Aunty April’s funeral the autumn before that. He had been, then, an unremarkable fifteen year old, uncomfortable in his school blazer and tie. Suddenly, Rachel found herself under scrutiny from her neighbour, and she realised that she had been staring.
‘Last time I saw you,’ Rob said, loudly, ‘you’d wet your knickers!’ It was true; too much orange squash, the interminable service spent perched on hard pews in a freezing church and then the long, slow walk through the churchyard in a biting October wind had combined to embarrass her. There was a shocked silence as everyone wondered how this conversational faux pas should be handled. Rob’s comment, while true, was, at this stage, inappropriate. It reminded everyone of the last time they had been together; of poor Simon and dead April and the three little motherless children she had left behind her, and of the promises they had all made to themselves (and not kept) to make up for her absence by lavishing love and care upon them. Every eye was on Rachel. She felt herself fold up from the inside, deflating like a tyre with a slow puncture. Her anxiety, her feelings of disconnectedness, her dissatisfaction with her clothes, her hesitancy over the bedroom, her desire to be older, thinner, elsewhere: it had all been warning her of this. She wanted to run. She thought she might be sick again. Sh
e put her hands down on to the bench on either side of her, ready to get up, thinking, as she did so, that even her exit could be nothing other than undignified as she struggled to get her legs from where they were imprisoned underneath the table. But before her body could translate the thought into action, she felt Ellie’s reassuring hand over hers, and heard Uncle Jude growl, ‘Not cool, man.’ James levelled a steady eye at his nephew and asked with seeming irrelevance, ‘Found the potting shed yet, Rob?’ a veiled but, to the family, well-remembered reference to Rob’s childhood habit of disappearing into his grandfather’s potting shed to fill the plant pots with excreta.
‘Yes!’ shouted Granddad from the bottom of the table, his mind suddenly illumined by this memory from the past, ‘you were a mucky little bugger, my lad!’
Everybody laughed. The moment passed.
Aunty Belinda served the rich brown casserole. Elliot moved down the table pouring wine, Ellie squeezed Rachel’s hand and then let go and poured water into their glasses. Everybody was talking. Rachel was absorbed into the circle of baby talk with Heather and Ellie and Mary. Jude drummed gently on the table top with the ends of his fingers and spoke modestly of the huge charity concert he had lately done in aid of African famine victims and politely requested that a plate of food be kept to one side for Mitch. Ruth seemed to be concentrating on keeping herself together; she was drunk. Rob grinned inanely, but his eyes avoided faces and when his plateful of casserole and vegetables arrived he hadn’t the courage to do anything other than eat it.
At last, when everyone was served, and the busy talk had been succeeded by the busy clatter of cutlery on crockery, Belinda sat down. She had returned the casserole and vegetables to the warming oven of the Aga. She still hoped that Simon and Miriam and the children would join them for part of the meal. The arrival of Mitch with Heather and Jude had thrown her temporarily; as useful as he was to them, she had not expected them to bring him on holiday. He would need accommodation and consideration. There was the possibility that June and Les too would need putting up for the night, although Les, she noted, had drunk nothing after his glass of beer in the drawing room.