What You Make It Read online

  Doug and Julia arrived first, as usual: they were always invited on a ‘turn up when you feel like it’ basis. Helena was only just out of the shower so Julia went up to chat with her; meanwhile Doug and I stood in the kitchen with bottles of beer and chewed a variety of rags, him nibbling on Helena's cooking, me trying to rearrange things so she wouldn't notice.

  We moved out into the yard when Becky and Janny arrived, and I started the Weber up, supervising the coals with foreman-ship from Helena at the table. I'd strung a couple of extension speakers out the door from the stereo in the living room, and one of Helena's compilation minidiscs played quietly in the background: something old, something new, something funky and something blue. Jack sat neatly on a chair at the end of the trestle in his new pants and checked shirt, sipping at a diet coke and waiting for the real fun to begin. Becky chatted with him in the meantime, while Janny reran horror stories of her last relationship: she's working on being the Fran Liebowitz of her generation, and getting there real fast. When everyone round the table erupted as she got to the end of yet another example of why her ex-boyfriend had not been fit to walk the earth, Helena caught my eye, and smiled.

  I knew what she meant. There but for the grace of God, she was thinking, could have gone you or I.

  Being funny is cool; being happy is better. I left the coals to themselves for a bit, and went and stood behind Helena with my hand on her shoulder.

  But then the doorbell went and she jumped up to let Adam and Carol in. Jack stood uncertainly, waiting for them to come through into the garden. Their two kids, whose names I could never remember, walked out behind them. There was a moment of quiet mutual appraisal, and then all three ran off towards the tree to play some game or other. They'd only ever met once before, on a trip we took to England, but obviously whatever they'd got up to then was still good for another day. As the evening began to darken, and the adults sat round the table and drank and ate, I could hear always in the background one of my favourite sounds of all, the sound of Jack laughing.

  And smell Helena's barbecue sauce, wafting over from the grill; and feel Helena's leg, her thigh warm against my leg, her ankle hooked behind mine.

  At ten I came out of the house, clutching more beers, and realized two things. The first was that I was kind of drunk. Negotiating the step down from the kitchen was a little more difficult than it should have been, and the raucous figures around the trestle table looked less than clear. I shook my head, trying to get it back together: I didn't want to appear inebriated in front of my son. Not that he was on hand to watch – the kids were still tirelessly cavorting off in the darkness of the far end of the yard.

  The second thing I noticed was less tangible. Something to do with atmosphere. While I'd been in the kitchen, it had changed. People were still laughing, and laughing hard, but they'd moved round, were sitting in different positions at the table. I guess I'd been in the kitchen longer than I thought. Becky and Jan were huddled at one end of the table, and I perched myself on a chair nearby. But they were talking seriously about something, and didn't seem to want to involve me.

  There was another burst of laughter from the other end, and I looked blearily towards it. There was something harsh in the sound. Helena and Carol were leaned in tight together, their faces red and shiny. Adam was chortling with Doug and Julia. It was good to see them getting on together, but I hadn't realized they were all so chummy. Adam had only been with the firm for a year before upping stakes and going with Carol back to her own country. Doug and I had been friends for twenty years. Still, I guess it showed the evening was going well.

  Then I saw something I couldn't understand. Helena's hand, reaching out and taking a cigarette from the packet lying on the table. I frowned vaguely, knowing something wasn't right, but she stuck the cigarette in her mouth and lit it with her lighter.

  Then I remembered that she'd started a few months before, finally dragged into my habit. I felt guilty again, wishing I'd been able to stop before she started. Too late now, I suppose.

  I reached for the bottle of beer I'd perched on the end of the table, and missed. Well, not quite missed: I made enough contact to knock it off the table. Janny rolled her eyes and started to lean down for it, but I beat her to it.

  ‘It's okay, I'm not that drunk,’ I said, slightly stiffly. This wasn't true, of course, because it took me rather longer than it should to find the bottle. In the end I had to completely lean over and look for where it had gone. This gave me a view of all the legs under the table, which was kind of neat, and I remained like that for a moment. Lots of shins, all standing together.

  Some more together than others, I saw. Helena's foot was resting against Doug's.

  I straightened up abruptly, cracking my head on the end of the table. Conversation around the table stopped, and I found myself with seven pairs of eyes looking at me.

  ‘Sorry,’ I said, and went back into the kitchen to get another beer.

  A couple later, really pretty drunk by then. Didn't want to sit back down at the table, felt like walking around a bit. Besides, Janny and Becky were still in conference, Janny looking odd; Adam and Carol and Julia talking about something else. I didn't feel like butting in.

  Headed off towards the tree, thinking I'd see what the kids were up to. Maybe they'd play with me for a while. Better make an effort to talk properly – didn't want Jack to see Daddy zonked. Usually it's okay, as my voice stays pretty straight unless I'm completely loaded, and as I couldn't score any coke that afternoon, that wasn't the case.

  Coke? What the fuck was I talking about?

  I ground to a halt then, suddenly confused. I didn't take coke, never had. Well, once, a few years back: it had been fun, but not worth the money – and an obvious slippery slope. Too easy to take until it was all gone, and then just buy some more. Plus Helena would have gone ballistic – she didn't even like me smoking, for God's sake.

  Then I remembered her taking a cigarette earlier, and felt cold. She hadn't started smoking. That was nonsense.

  So why did I think she had?

  I started moving again, not because I felt I'd solved anything, but because I heard a sound. It wasn't laughing. It was more like quiet tears.

  At the far end of the yard I found Jack's camp, a little clearing huddled up against wisteria that clung to the fence. I pushed through the bushes, swearing quietly.

  Jack was sitting in the middle, tears rolling down his moonlike face. His check shirt was covered in dirt, the leg of his pants torn. Adam's kids were standing around him, giggling and pointing. As I lumbered towards them the little girl hurled another clump of earth at Jack. It struck him in the face, just above the eye.

  For a moment I was totally unable to move, and then I lunged forward and grabbed her arm.

  ‘Piss off, you little bastards,’ I hissed, yanking them away from my son. They stared up at me, faces full of some thought I couldn't read. Then the little boy pulled his arm free, and his sister did the same. They ran off laughing towards the house.

  I turned again to Jack, who was staring at the fence.

  ‘Come on, big guy,’ I said, bending down to take him in my arms. ‘What was that all about?’

  His face slowly turned to mine, and my heart sank at what was always there to see. The slight glaze in the eyes, the slackness at one corner of his mouth.

  ‘Dada,’ he said. ‘They dirt me.’

  I fell down onto my knees beside him, wrapping my arms around his thin shoulders. I held him tight, but as always sensed his eyes looking over my shoulder, gazing off into the middle distance at something no one else could see.

  Eventually I let go of him and rocked to my feet again, hand held down towards him. He took it and struggled to his feet. I led him out of the bushes and into the yard.

  As we came close to the tree I saw Helena and Doug approaching out the darkness. I sensed some kind of rearrangement taking place as they saw us, but couldn't work out what it might have been.

  ‘Oh shit, wh
at's happened now?’ Helena said, reading Jack's state instantly and stepping towards us. Doug hung back, in the deep shadows.

  I couldn't answer her. Partly just because I was drunk; I'd obviously over-compensated for my dealer's coke famine by drinking way more than usual. But mainly because there was something wrong with her face. Not her face, which was as beautiful as ever. Her lipstick. It was smudged all over.

  ‘Christ, you're useless,’ she snapped, and grabbed Jack's hand. I didn't watch as she hauled him back towards the house. Instead I stared into the darkness under the tree, where a faint glow showed Doug was lighting a cigarette.

  ‘Having a good evening?’ I asked.

  ‘Oh yeah,’ he said, laughing quietly. ‘You guys always throw such great parties.’

  We walked back to the trestle table, neither of us saying anything.

  I sat down next to the girls, glanced across at Becky. She looked a lot worse than the last time we'd seen her. The chemo obviously wasn't working.

  ‘How are you feeling?’ I asked.

  She looked up at me, smiled tightly. ‘Fine, just fine,’ she said. She didn't want my sympathy, and never had since the afternoon I'd called round at her place, looking for some company.

  Behind me I heard Doug getting up and going through into the kitchen. I'd never liked Julia, nor she me, and so it would be no comfort to look round and see her eyes following her husband into the house, where Helena would already have dispatched Jack up to bed with a slap on the behind, and would maybe be standing at the sink, washing something that didn't need washing.

  Instead, I watched Adam and Carol talking together. They at least looked happy.

  I stood at the front door as the last set of tail-lights turned into the road and faded away. Helena stood behind me. When I turned to take her hand she smiled meaninglessly, her face hard and distant, and walked away. I lumbered into my study to turn the computer off.

  Instead I found myself waking it from sleep, and clicked into my mail program. I read the letter from my sister, who seemed to be doing fine. She was redecorating her new house with her new boyfriend. I nodded to myself; it was good that things were finally going her way.

  I turned at a sound behind me to find Helena standing there. She plonked a cup of coffee down on the desk beside me.

  ‘There you go, Mister Man,’ she said, and I smiled up at her. I didn't need the coffee, because I hadn't drunk very much. Sitting close to Helena all evening was still all the intoxication I needed. But it would be nice anyway.

  ‘Good evening?’ she asked, running her fingers across the back of my neck.

  ‘Good evening,’ I said, looping my arm around her waist.

  ‘Well don't stay down here too long,’ she winked, ‘because we could make it even better.’

  After she'd gone I applied myself to the screen, but before I could starting writing a reply to my little sis I heard Helena's voice again. This time it was hard, and came as usual from outside the study.

  ‘Put your fucking son to bed,’ she said. ‘I can't deal with him tonight.’

  I turned, but she was already gone. I sat with my head in my hands for a little while, then reached out for the coffee. It wasn't there.

  Then something on the screen caught my eye. Something I'd dismissed earlier. ‘Read This!’ it said.

  As much to avoid going upstairs as anything, I double-clicked on the mail icon. A long text message burped up onto the screen, and I frowned. My killfile tests usually only ran a couple of lines. Blinking against the drunkenness slopping through my head I tried to focus on the first sentence.

  I managed to read it, in the end. And then the next, and as I read all the way through I felt as if my chair was sinking, dropping lower and lower into the ground.

  The message was from me. It was about Same Again, and finally I remembered.

  Before I'd come home that afternoon, I'd gone to their offices in the business district. It was the second time I'd been, the first when I signed up for the service and had a preliminary backup done a year before. When I'd got up that morning, woken by Jack's cheerful chatter and feeling the warmth of Helena's buttocks against mine under the sheets, I'd suddenly realized that if there were any day on which to make a backup of my life, today was surely that day.

  I'd driven over to their offices, sat in the chair and they'd done their thing, archiving the current state of affairs into a data file. A file which, as their blurb promised, I could access at any time life had gone wrong and I needed to return to the saved version.

  I heard a noise out in the hallway, the sound of a small person bumping into a piece of furniture. Jack. In a minute I should go out and help him, put him to bed. Maybe read to him a little, see if I could get a few more words into his head. If not, just hold him a while, as he slipped off into a sleep furnished with a vagueness I could never understand.

  All it takes is one little sequence of DNA out of place, one infinitesimal chemical reaction going wrong. That's all the difference there is between the child he was, and could have been. Becky would understand that. One of her cells had misbehaved too, like a 1 or 0 the wrong way round in some computer program.

  Wet towels. Heavy rain. A leaking ceiling.

  Suddenly I remembered going to a dark office on Montaigne in the wet small hours of some future morning. The strange way the man with the towel had reacted when I said I needed to do a restore from a backup they held there. And I knew what had happened. There'd been an accident.

  The same rain which had totalled the car which for the moment still sat out in the drive, had corrupted the data I'd spent so much money to save.

  At the bottom of the mail message was a number. I called it. Same Again's 24-hour switchboard was unobtainable. I listened to a recorded voice for a while, and then replaced the handset.

  Maybe they'd gone out of business. Backing up was, after all, illegal. Too easy for criminals to leap backwards before their mistakes, for politicians to run experiments. Wide scale, it would have caused chaos. So long as not many people knew, you could get away with it. The disturbance was undetectable.

  But now I knew, and this disturbance was far too great.

  I could feel, like a heavy weight, the aura of the woman lying in the bed above my head. Could predict the firmness with which her back would be turned towards me, the way Doug and I would dance around each other at work the next day, and the endless drudgery of the phone calls required to score enough coke to make it all go away for a while.

  ‘Hi Dad – you still up?’

  Jack stood in the doorway. He'd taken three apples from the kitchen, and was attempting to juggle them. He couldn't quite do it yet, but I thought it wouldn't be too long now. Perhaps I would learn then, and we could do that stuff where you swap balls with one another. That might be kind of cool.

  ‘Yep,’ I said, ‘but not for much longer. How about you go up, get your teeth brushed, and then I'll read you a story?’

  But he'd corrupted again by then, and the apples fell one by one, to bruise on the hardwood floor. His eyes stared, slightly out of kilter, at my dusty bookcase, his fingers struggling at a button on his shirt. I reached forward and wiped away the thin dribble of saliva that ran from the bad corner of his mouth.

  ‘Come on, little guy,’ I said, and hoisted him up.

  As I carried him upstairs into the darkness, his head lolling against my shoulder, I wondered how much had changed, whether in nine months the crash would still come as we drove back from a happy evening in Gainesville.

  And I wondered, if it did, whether I would do anything to avoid it.

  Or if I would steer the car harder this time.

  MORE BITTER THAN DEATH

  ‘That was bollocks,’ said Nick amiably, leaning on his cue. ‘You've produced some terrible shots this evening, but that really has to take it. Go to the library, get out a book on basic physics. Start again from the ground up.’

  I stepped back from the table and replied with a cheerful obscenity bef
ore taking a sip of my beer. I wasn't playing that badly on the whole, but the last couple of games had been very erratic. When I play a pool shot, it's either very good or abysmal. There doesn't seem to be a middle ground in my game, any ‘fairly good’ or ‘not bad’ shots. How I'm playing depends solely on the ratio of the sublime to the ridiculous.

  ‘If this comes off…’ Nick muttered, lining up an ambitious double cannon. ‘You'll have confirmed your standing as the luckiest player in the cosmos,’ I finished for him.

  Not only did the shot not come off, it sent the cue ball clear off the table to bounce loudly on the wooden floor and rocket off towards the other side of the hall. Because I was nearest, I went after it. Players at the other tables watched impassively as I tried not to look as if I was scurrying.

  The pool hall in the Archway Tavern is on the first floor, a large bare rectangular room with high ceilings that covers the area of the two bars on the floor below. There are two snooker tables and five for pool, an area of seats and tables around the nuclear-powered juke box, and a bar set into the wall near the door. Not an especially prepossessing room, in a fairly rough Irish pub (painted entirely green on the outside, just in case anyone should be in any doubt), but I'd been going there to play pool regularly for over a year, and there'd never been any trouble. While the locals are generally too taciturn to be called friendly they always seem fairly affable, and with discs full of the Fureys and the Dubliners in the juke box the atmosphere on a good night is pretty good.

  The cue ball made it all the way to the far corner of the room, banging to rest under the pool table there.

  ‘Sorry,’ I said, trying not to sound too English, and crouched down to retrieve it. The two youths at the table continued playing. Reaching under, I scrabbled with my fingertips and eventually dislodged the ball. I stood up rather quickly and felt my head dizzy for a moment as I turned to head back to the other side of the room.

  Then suddenly the evening, which was already fine, took a turn for the better.