The playground felt safer now, had been smartened up in lots of ways and the charge was minimal really at five pounds for a whole afternoon, but of course there had been controversy, which she understood too. She remembers going there once with Frank and Milly, seeing a group of youths, fourteen or fifteen years old bunched around the entrance, backs to her, and feeling, she admits, intimidated until it was suddenly, gruffly, yo, yo, yo, fam, let this lady through and hands are pulling a bemused white boy in a Skeeter cap out of their way, slapping him round the back of the neck and saying pay attention, dickhead, as the group parts to let her pass. She murmurs thank you, smiles at the boy who spotted her. He avoids eye contact, keeps shouting playful abuse at his friend.
Fam. She thought it was a name, then she heard Alex using it ironically to one of his friends round the dinner table one night and asked naively, what does that mean? Then they told her, laughing. Family. Yo, yo, yo fam. Family, that full and overflowing, warm word, that world.
Those boys are gone now.
She found she had gravitated toward the park again. The woman from the veg shop has sat down beside her on the bench. Karen smiles and swipes her hair behind her ear.
Hello darling.
Hi.
I am here with the grandkids, she says, and gestures to two shaven-headed six year olds in tracksuit bottoms and Winfield trainers. We had to pay. Pay to get in. Never used to have to pay, she says.
Karen smiles. Yes. Aren’t there concessions? She asks.
Concessions?
Well. Karen smiles. Well, indeed, concessions for being poor, Karen, is that what you mean?
Oh I don’t know, I thought there might be something.
Nothing I could see. She coughs, stares straight ahead.
Made a mistake there, Karen. She should go round and buy the veg for the party from her to make up for things. This party, will Alex even be here for it?
Of course she has had to invite Dominic. The last time they met up, it must have been, what, October, had been stressful. Karen liked him, of course, she admired his cleverness, everyone did, but she thought that perhaps this famously acerbic wit, his no-nonsense directness, the honesty that everyone praised him for, was too close to bullying sometimes, too close to cynicism.
She had expressed her reservations to Alex a few times, circumspectly, but he had always leapt to Dominic’s defence. If it wasn’t for Dominic he might not have been published at all.
What had he said about
Gilligan’s Century
last time? Where’s the insight? I see information, I see it’s smart, I see it knows popular culture, but where is its insight? What does Gilligan do? He drifts through the century in search of his brother, so everyone from Stockhausen to Oppenheimer gets a starring role in the narrative, though this search for the brother is finally only really Gilligan’s search for himself, for a kind of escape from modern alienation that resolves itself at the century’s end in his recognition of love as the universal solvent. All very well, probably, in the execution, but Gilligan himself, he’s a cipher. It’s not simply stitching together Wikipedia entries, a novel. I’m not accusing you of this exactly, but what I am saying, what I’m asking you is, where’s the heart of the book?
He grinned. His teeth and lips were sooty with wine, his face heavy and pale, the bright little dark eyes. He looks like a Geisha, she thought. She remembered she’d read that traditionally they had painted their mouths black. She had found that erotic somehow. But on Dominic it looked simply, well, unpleasant.
In the taxi home at two-thirty Alex sat staring glassy eyed out of the window, and she wondered, not for the first time, why he had to get so wrecked. There must be some underlying unhappiness, disappointment with her, perhaps. Dominic was a bad influence in that respect, egging him on, constantly refilling his glass, rolling joint after joint. At least they had stayed off the coke that night, or they would still have been there, at the kitchen table, arguing.
Back home Alex had crashed out on the sofa. It was impossible to wake him up so she brought down a quilt and threw it over him, then laying in the bed on her own she found it difficult to sleep. She hoped the book would do well. Even bad reviews, he had said, were better than indifference. Something to fight against was invigorating, but just to see it disappear into a void, three years of hard work shrugged at, given a six out of ten then quietly left to rot. Of course his father didn’t help. He tried to disguise it but he was competitive, which, given his age and his success seemed a little, well, childish. The subtle digs and comparisons, barbed little bits of advice. Alex wasn’t like his father in that respect, or like Dominic who was superhumanly thick-skinned. He didn’t handle criticism well, he got depressed. Now he was claiming it was Seasonal Affective Disorder, and perhaps there was some truth to it, the cycling round of his disordered affect running to a calendar and a rhythm of their own.
She was the one who had suggested he should get some Deveretol in the first place, semi-legal, almost everyone she knew in work was making tremendous claims for it, how it had boosted their performance in work, in the gym, allowed them to get by on almost no sleep. Chaz insisted it had accelerated his ability to learn Turkish by 75%, Milla said that in social groups she felt she could hear and effortlessly absorb several simultaneous conversations and recall them later with unerring accuracy, Peter said that his recovery time from an Ultramarathon had been reduced by 50%. She has been tempted to get on it herself but some lingering anxiety about medication, about addiction, have held her back. It’s certainly helped lift Alex out of the doldrums, though it’s hard to know whether he wouldn’t have been entering his up phase now anyway. She feels vaguely guilty about suggesting it, faintly responsible as though it were her own impatience that pushed him into taking it. She Googled Deveretol side effects, tried to find something that looked official and trustworthy, and found a Guardian article she skim-read that mentioned paranoia, grandiosity, ecstatic aphasia, chronolepsy.
The grandkids, two unhealthy looking, aggressively active blond boys, twins, something coarse, like cheap recycled paper in the grain of their skin, slightly sunken eyes, have run up to them now, shouting at their grandmother in a broad estuary English she can barely understand. The woman stands and busies herself with them, tugging their coats about and remonstrating with them to tuck themselves in, tie their laces.
Bye, then.
Bye. Yes, bye.
Karen sits back, watching the kids playing over on the Junior Gym. For no clear reason she gets up and walks a few yards, sits down on one of the swings, turned back toward the road. An afternoon off to work from home and she seems to be squandering it. Pull yourself together Karen. No one has time for uncertainty or vacillation or mopiness. Look at Alex, he’s got some project underway and he doesn’t care about leaving her alone, spending all day every day for weeks, months, years at a time chasing up leads, researching, spending long hours at the laptop getting stuff done. Then again for him it’s easier, he has down time between assignments and projects, whereas for her it seems to be a non-stop twenty-four seven full or partial demand.
Yes, that phrase of Dominic’s about not accusing Alex of anything and Wikipedia entries came back to her, when, a week or so later, accusations of plagiarism began to surface that became a torrent. Alex was tweeting away furiously, fire-fighting, acknowledging his debts and offering justifications she herself couldn’t quite grasp. She wondered, though she said nothing, whether Dominic weren’t responsible in some way. Surely that was beyond the pale though, they were friends and there was lots of ribbing but it was an intense, fundamentally friendly, almost fraternal rivalry that had been there forever, since they were star students together.
So, anyway, she couldn’t not invite Dominic, or Jaqui, who still didn’t have a child either and was always complaining about how now when she went out anywhere everybody brought their kids along. So many newborns, pushchairs, tired looking mums, this sudden flurry in and out of rooms and bouncing and dandling. Karen welcomed it if she was honest, a distraction from the endless, half comprehensible monologues and backbiting, some practical things she could engage in, excuse herself, escape, and plus the babies themselves, so sweet.
Her phone is in her hand again and she’s flicking through things in a trance, neither here nor there, her mind in several different places at once and a void in the middle. Where are you Karen? She shouts at herself. Where are you?
She gets up off the swing, her back slightly stiff. Enough of this, this is getting you nowhere, you need to be more productive. Like it says in
Yourtime/Youtime
, “everyday, every minute, every second, is a meeting and a process, an emotional engagement and a set of commitments, an opportunity to know and enrich yourself, materially and spiritually, and to do the same with and for and through others”. Come on Karen! Get up off that bench! Socialise! Connect! Relate! Empathise! Work!
She rummages through the Freshco Organic Freshbox they had delivered that morning and wonders suddenly whether Alex and Jaqui might not have made a better couple. They seem to enthuse about the same things, share the same interests. Karen wishes she was creative, artistic, had a greater understanding and appreciation of culture.
She puts the radishes down on the chopping board, selects a knife, busies herself, and finds after an hour or so that she has opened and consumed the best part of a bottle of white. Whoops. She glances at the clock on the oven. Better be careful, Karen, not even five o’clock yet.
The doorbell rings. Someone is early. Alex is still upstairs in the shower. Karen composes herself, goes to the door and is unsurprised but still faintly irritated to find that it is Dominic, wearing an extremely long, thick scarf even though it’s still mild and holding a bottle of Independent Gin in one hand and a Sainsbury’s bag filled with homemade tonic water and lemons in the other. Dominic never seems to have a hangover, never seems to tire or flag. She can’t imagine him waking up in the morning and scrambling for the paracetamol, he’s boundlessly out drinking, networking, entertaining into the small hours,
carousing
, Dominic would no doubt say, then up and editing, reading, writing, working through his slush pile and setting up meetings, going to launches, partying, unstintingly performing and projecting his persona at a pitch and intensity that is wearying to watch. He is the type described in books and profiles as possessed of “prodigious energy”, some strange chemical bequest that allows him to sail effortlessly onward through life powered by all the advantages of background, education and physical robustness, an armour-plated ego. And, she would say, though he’s not her cup of tea, he’s handsome too.
She pecks him on the cheek and says, Hi, come on in, how are you, her voice slightly higher and her delivery brusquer than she would like it to be, shrill with insincerity, hard to make eye contact. Just behind Dominic, having parked the car, Barney appears at the gate smiling with a spectacularly attractive women in a long, tight dress made of Chinese silk who clasps a bunch of roses, her eyes lowered, waiting for an introduction, an induction into the group.
She takes coats and bags, pecks more cheeks, spirits bottles and flowers off to the kitchen with Oh lovelies and Fantastics as Alex comes jogging down the stairs.
Good, they can keep each other entertained. Karen is pleased to have Barney there; he is a good foil for Dominic. The new girl, on closer inspection, and inspect her they all do, is a willowy and exceptionally beautiful Brazilian with big honey-coloured eyes and sandy, lightly waved hair. Stella is her name and Dominic announces that she is the perfect guest, straddling as she does the worlds of high art and high finance. She has written a book Dominic is currently editing called
Perverse Incentives
, that she says with a rueful, flirtatious smile and a flick of her beautifully bobbed hair, is going to be marketed as a
Fifty Shades of Gre
y of Finance, a kind of
Roman à clef
of her time being chased, seduced and romanced by some of the City’s most eligible bad boys, high fliers and wunderkinds. It’s a three book deal, she says. She can’t compare what she does to Alex’s work, of course, it’s not art, whatever Dominic might kindly say, it’s not literature, but she thinks at least it is pacey and sexy and a lot of fun, plus it might give some people an insight into what City life is really like, that it is, in many ways, a gilded cage.
Karen starts getting everyone a drink with Alex already deep in conversation with Dominic and Barney. The doorbell goes again and a few moments later Peter and Jaqui are in the kitchen, arms full of bags and coats, kissing her on the cheek and helping by slicing the lemons and limes, knocking ice cubes out of trays and commenting on how yummy the food smells, how great she looks, how much they love coming to her lovely home and what a star she is before disappearing into the living room.
Moments later Jaqui’s back in the kitchen asking for a bottle opener, Alex seems to have misplaced the other one, looked everywhere, puff! just disappeared. Luckily they have another one, in the drawer there, next to the cooker.
Great, Jaqui says, and heads for the living room, then pauses and half pivots back, eyebrows raised. Need a hand?
Karen blows her hair up off her face. Everyone OK for drinks?
Jaqui smiles. Dominic’s got everyone on the G and T’s, the most amazing homemade tonic water. So creamy. Want one in here?
I would love a G and T, she says.
Ice and a slice? Asked in a singsong voice.
Perfect.
They beam at each other. Karen turns back to her cooking and 30 seconds later Jaqui pops a glass down at her elbow. She takes a sip. Yummy, she shouts back over her shoulder. Isn’t it just, Jaqui shouts back over hers.
Goodness me, that’s strong. Typical Dominic, always getting everyone drunk. She hopes he hasn’t brought any drugs with him.