One Day (49 page)

Enraged now, Dexter steps straight off the pavement and waves his arms at the many black cabs that head westward, but none of them will stop for him, not while he’s staggering in the road like this. He takes a deep breath, steps back onto the pavement, leans against a wall and checks his pockets. His wallet has gone, and so have his keys, to his flat and his car. Whoever’s got the keys and wallet will have his address too, it’s on his driving licence, he’ll have to have the locks changed, and Sylvie’s meant to be coming round at lunch time. She’s bringing Jasmine. He kicks at the wall, rests his head against the bricks, checks his pockets again, finds a balled-up twenty-pound note in his trouser pocket, damp from his own urine. Twenty quid is enough to get him safely home. He can wake up the neighbours, get the spare key, sleep it off.

But twenty quid is also enough to get him into town, with change for another drink or two. Home or oblivion? Forcing himself to stand straight, he hails a cab and sends it into Soho.

Through a plain red door in an alley off Berwick Street he finds an illicit underground dive that he used to go to ten, fifteen years ago as a very last resort. It’s a grubby windowless room, dark and dense with smoke and people drinking from cans of Red Stripe. He crosses to the formica table that doubles as a bar, using the crowd for support, but then discovers that he has no cash, has given the last of it to the taxi-driver, lost the change. He’ll have to do what he always used to do when he had lost all his money, pick up the nearest drink and neck it. He walks back into the room, ignoring the abuse of the people he stumbles into, grabs what looks like a forgotten can and drains what’s left, then boldly takes another and jams himself in a corner, sweating, his head against a loudspeaker, his eyes closed, the drink running down his chin and onto his shirt and suddenly there’s a hand against his chest pushing him back into the corner and someone wants to know what the
fuck
he thinks he’s playing at, nicking people’s drinks. He opens his eyes: the man before him is old, red-eyed, squat like a toad.

‘Actually, I think you’ll find it’s mine,’ says Dexter, then sniggers at how unconvincing the lie is. The man snarls, bares his yellow teeth and shows his fist, and Dexter realises what he wants: he wants the man to hit him. ‘Get your hands off me, you ugly old cunt,’ he slurs, and then there’s a blur and a noise like static, and he is lying on the floor with his hands to his face as the man kicks at his stomach and stamps on his back with his heel. Dexter tastes the foul carpet as the kicks come down, and then suddenly he is floating, face down, six men lifting him by the legs and arms, like at school when it was his birthday and all his mates threw him in the pool and he is whooping and laughing as they carry him along the corridor through a restaurant kitchen and out into the alley where he is bowled into a huddle of plastic bins. Still laughing he rolls off onto the hard, filthy ground and feels the blood in his mouth, the hot iron taste of it, and he thinks, well, it’s what she would have wanted. This is what she would have wanted.

‘Dexter, can you hear me? Oh, God, what have you done? Can you hear me Dex? Open your eyes, will you?’

When he wakes, Sylvie is there. Somehow he is lying on the floor of his flat, jammed between the sofa and the table, and she is standing awkwardly above him, trying to pull him out of the narrow space and get him into a sitting position. His clothes are wet and sticky and he realises that he has been sick in his sleep. He is appalled and ashamed but powerless to move as Sylvie grunts and gasps, her hands beneath his armpits.

‘Oh, Sylvie,’ he says, struggling to help her. ‘I’m sorry. I fucked up again.’

‘Just sit up for me will you, honey?’

‘I’m fucked up, Sylvie. I am so fucked up …’

‘You’ll be fine, you need to sleep it off that’s all. Oh, don’t cry, Dexter. Listen to me, will you?’ She’s kneeling with her hands on his face now, looking at him with a tenderness he rarely saw when they were married. ‘We’ll get you cleaned up and into bed, and you can sleep it off. Okay?’

Glancing past her he sees a figure loitering anxiously in the doorway: his daughter. He groans and thinks he might be sick again, so powerful is the sudden spasm of shame.

Sylvie follows his gaze. ‘Jasmine sweetheart, please wait in the other room, will you?’ she says, as levelly as possible. ‘Daddy’s not feeling very well.’ Jasmine doesn’t move. ‘I told you, go next door!’ says Sylvie, panic rising in her voice.

He wants very much to say something to reassure Jasmine, but his mouth is swollen and bruised and he can’t seem to form the words, and instead he lies back down, defeated. ‘Don’t move,’ says Sylvie, ‘Just stay exactly where you are,’ and she leaves the room, taking their daughter with her. He closes his eyes, waiting, praying for all of this to pass. There are voices in the hall. Phone-calls are made.

The next thing that he knows for sure is that he is in the back of a car, curled uncomfortably on the back seat beneath a tartan blanket. He pulls it tight around him – despite the warm day he can’t seem to stop shivering – and realises that it’s the old
picnic blanket which, along with the smell of the car’s scuffed burgundy upholstery, reminds him of family days out. With some difficulty he lifts his head to look out of the passenger window. They are on the motorway. Mozart plays on the radio. He sees the back of his father’s head, fine silver-grey hair neatly trimmed apart from the tufts in his ears.

‘Where are we going?’

‘I’m taking you home. Go back to sleep.’

His father has abducted him. For a moment he considers arguing: Take me back to London, I’m fine, I’m not a child. But the leather is warm against his face, he doesn’t have the energy to move, let alone argue. He shivers once more, pulls the blanket up to his chin and falls asleep.

He is woken by the sound of the wheels on the gravel of the large, sturdy family home. ‘In you come then,’ says his father, opening the car door like a chauffeur. ‘Soup for tea!’ and he walks towards the house, tossing the car keys jauntily into the air as he goes. Clearly he has decided to pretend that nothing out of the ordinary has happened, and Dexter is grateful for this. Hunched and unsteady, he clambers from the car, shrugs off the picnic blanket and follows him inside.

In the small downstairs bathroom he inspects his face in the mirror. His bottom lip is cut and swollen, and there’s a large, yellow-brown bruise down one side of his face. He tries to roll his shoulders, but his back aches, the muscles stretched and torn. He winces, then examines his tongue, ulcerous, bitten at the sides and coated with a grey mould. He runs the tip of it over his teeth. They never feel clean these days, and he can smell his own breath reflecting back off the mirror. It has a faecal quality, as if something is decaying inside him. There are broken veins on his nose and cheek. He is drinking with a renewed sense of purpose, nightly and frequently during the day, and has gained a great deal of weight; his face is podgy and slack, his eyes permanently red and rheumy.

He rests his head against the mirror and exhales. In the years he was with Emma he sometimes wondered idly what life would
be like if she weren’t around; not in a morbid way, just pragmatically, speculatively, because don’t all lovers do this? Wonder what he would be without her? Now the answer is in the mirror. Loss has not endowed him with any kind of tragic grandeur, it has just made him stupid and banal. Without her he is without merit or virtue or purpose, a shabby, lonely, middle-aged drunk, poisoned with regret and shame. An unwanted memory rises up of that morning, of his own father and his ex-wife undressing him and helping him into the bath. In two weeks time he will be forty-one, and his father is helping him into the bath. Why couldn’t they just have taken him to hospital to have his stomach pumped? There would have been more dignity in that.

In the hallway he can hear his father talking to his sister, shouting into the telephone. He sits on the edge of the bath. It requires no effort to eavesdrop. In fact it’s impossible not to hear.

‘He woke the neighbours, trying to kick his own door down. They let him in … Sylvie found him on the floor … It seems he had a bit too much to drink that’s all … just cuts and bruises … Absolutely no idea. Anyway, we’ve cleaned him up. He’ll be fine in the morning. Do you want to come and say hello?’ In the bathroom, Dexter prays for a ‘no’, but his sister clearly can see no pleasure in it either. ‘Fair enough, Cassie. Maybe give him a call in the morning will you?’

When he is sure his father has gone, Dexter steps out into the hall and pads towards the kitchen. He drinks warm tap water from a dusty pint glass and looks out at the garden in the evening sun. The swimming pool is drained and covered with a sagging blue tarpaulin, the tennis court scrappy and overgrown. The kitchen, too, has a musty smell. The large family house has gradually closed down room by room, so that now his father occupies just the kitchen, living room and his bedroom, but even so it is still too large for him. His sister says that sometimes he sleeps on the sofa. Concerned, they have talked to him about
moving out, buying somewhere more manageable, a little flat in Oxford or London, but his father won’t hear of it. ‘I intend to die in my own house if you don’t mind,’ he says, a line of argument that’s too emotive to counter.

‘Feeling better then?’ His father stands behind him.

‘A little.’

‘What’s that?’ He nods towards Dexter’s pint glass. ‘Gin, is it?’

‘Just water.’

‘Glad to hear it. I thought we’d have soup tonight, seeing as how it’s a special occasion. Could you manage a tin of soup?’

‘I think so.’

He holds two tins in the air. ‘Mulligatawny or Cream of Chicken?’

So the two men shuffle around the large musty kitchen, a pair of widowers making more mess than is really necessary in warming two cans of soup. Since living alone, his father’s diet has reverted to that of an ambitious boy-scout: baked beans, sausages, fish-fingers; he has even been known to make himself a saucepan of jelly.

The phone rings in the hall. ‘Get that will you?’ says his father, mashing butter onto sliced white bread. Dexter hesitates. ‘It won’t bite you, Dexter.’

He goes into the hall and picks up. It’s Sylvie. Dexter settles on the stairs. His ex-wife lives alone now, the relationship with Callum having finally combusted just before Christmas time. Their mutual unhappiness, and a desire to protect Jasmine from this, has made them strangely close and for the first time since they got married they are almost friends.