The Other Son Read online

  THE OTHER SON

  Nick Alexander

  Nick Alexander was born in 1964 in the UK. He has travelled widely and has lived and worked both in the UK, the USA and France where he resides today. The Other Son is his twelfth fictional work. His 2015 novel, The Photographer's Wife, was a number one hit on Amazon UK whilst The Half-Life of Hannah published in 2014 has been named by Amazon as the 4th bestselling independently published Kindle title of all time.

  Nick lives in the southern French Alps with three ageing cats, a few fish and a very special ferret.

  Acknowledgements

  Thanks to Fay Weldon for encouraging me when it most counted. Thanks to Allan for his proofing and to Rosemary and Lolo for being there. Thanks to Karen, Jenny, Diana, Annie, Sergei and everyone else who gave me feedback on this novel. It wouldn’t have happened without you. Thanks to Amazon for turning the writing of novels back into something one can actually earn a living from.

  PART ONE – THE MARRIAGE

  NOVEMBER

  Alice slides the shoulder of the shirt over the end of the ironing board and slowly smoothes out the creases, working the iron gently back and forth. In front of her, beyond the window pane, the November rain lashes down, hammering the roses. They had been so pretty in summer, but now, like everything else, like her, in fact, they are merely hanging in there, waiting for winter to pass.

  From the lounge, she can hear the sound of a football match on TV. She flips the shirt over and starts on the other sleeve. She doesn’t mind ironing, in fact it’s probably the only household task that she enjoys. There’s something satisfying about turning that basket of jumble into piles of neatly folded order.

  She smoothes the cuff and thinks of the coming trip. For this is Ken’s best shirt, now ready for Mike Goodman’s funeral. There have been so many funerals recently and she’d really rather not go to this one. She imagines herself standing up to say a few words. “Mike was always good for a sexist joke,” she could say. “Mike never failed to turn up to dinner empty-handed! Mike could always be counted on to shock everyone with a good, juicy, racist remark!”

  She glances back out at the rain, follows, briefly, the movement of a droplet as it makes its way down the glass. She wonders how long it takes to get from Birmingham to Carlisle. Too long. She’s dreading the drive. Hours and hours trapped in the car with Ken.

  He scares her with his driving, always has done. He looks at you when he talks to you, that’s the thing, and on the motorway, she’d really rather that he didn’t do that. Sometimes, when he turns back to the road, he actually swerves as he corrects his trajectory, and she ends up being terse just to dissuade him from talking, just to stop him looking at her again. He gets angry in city traffic, too – turns into a monster in fact. And God forbid that she insult his manhood by asking him to slow down! At weddings he gets drunk, so at least she can drive home. But at a funeral it’s unlikely. Three or four hours each way! At home she can move to another room or she can nip out to the shops. In the car, there’s no escape.

  She drapes the shirt on a coat-hanger, then fastens the top button. She unplugs the iron and crosses to the window to peer outside. She chews the inside of her mouth then turns back to face the interior, crosses to the bread-bin and, hoping for an alibi, looks inside. She needs to get out. This weather’s making her stir-crazy.

  As she pulls on her coat in the hallway, Ken glances up at her briefly, but she can tell from his glassy-eyed stare that he hasn’t even assimilated the fact that she’s going out. His mind’s on the match and when his mind’s on the match it’s not available for anything else. It’s not so much that women are better at multitasking, she thinks. It’s that men can’t do it at all.

  By the time she gets back, the match has ended and the presenters are discussing what went wrong. “You’ve been out in this?” Ken asks, like a hypnotist’s subject suddenly back-in-the-room now the football is over.

  “We needed bread,” Alice explains, waving the carrier bag at him then shrugging out of the wet coat. “And I needed the walk.”

  “It’s raining up there as well,” Ken says nodding, presumably at the out-of-sight television set. “In Manchester.”

  “Rain stopped play?”

  “No. Nearly. They played badly, though. They were bloody awful, to be honest. Any chance of a cuppa?”

  Alice thinks that Ken could get up and make his own cup of tea, that he could even, lord forbid, make her one. “Of course,” she says, managing to say one phrase even as she thinks the other. “I was just about to make one anyway.”

  She’s pouring the water over the teabags when Ken appears in the doorway. He leans on the doorjamb and looks at her blankly. He smiles but actually looks a little sad – it’s probably because of the match. Football is generally the only thing that elicits much of an emotional response in him these days.

  “They’ve started selling Christmas decorations at Tesco,” she says. “Imagine that.”

  “A bit premature,” Ken agrees.

  “I asked the woman on the checkout if anyone actually bought Christmas decorations at the beginning of November and she said I'd be surprised. I wondered how she could tell.”

  “How she could tell what?”

  “Well, how surprised I’d be!”

  Ken frowns at her. He has never quite grasped Alice’s sense of humour.

  Alice squashes the teabag against the side of the cup thoughtfully. “Do you think Tim will invite us this year? Or should I plan to do something here?”

  Ken shrugs. “We’re barely into November, love,” he says.

  “I think that we’re still allowed to envisage events that haven’t happened yet, even in November. They haven’t made that a crime yet. And what about Matt? Do you think Matt will come home for Christmas?” She pours the milk.

  “I doubt it,” Ken says. “He didn’t bother last year, did he?”

  “Here.” She proffers the mug.

  “Thanks.”

  “He was in Sydney last year, so it wasn’t really an option,” Alice points out as Ken turns away down the hall. “But now he’s in...” She lets her voice fade away and exhales slowly. Because Ken has vanished from view. “Spain, maybe?” she mutters. “Or is it France?” She glances at the counter-top and wonders where Matt’s most recent postcard has got to.

  She imagines Matt sleeping under a bridge somewhere, like that singer he used to go on about all the time. The one who killed himself. Nick something. She has always feared that Matt will somehow end up badly. Perhaps it’s just because every pop star he ever worshipped was dead. Nick Drake, that was the one. And that chap from The Doors. There was the guy from that Australian band, too, and the one from Deaf Tiger or whatever they were called. He talked about dead pop stars so much that she knew all their names, became quite the expert. Tim liked ABBA and ELO. He liked bright bouncy music that even she could sing along to. Whereas Matt was always drawn to the dark side. Dead poets with miserable songs. The Smiths. That was another one. What was that song he used to like? Something to do with being run over by a double decker bus. He used to sing it all the time; he sang it so much that she knew all the words as well. She became quite a trendy mum at one point, thanks to her boys.

  But yes, it's hard to wonder about Matt’s future, hard to think about his whereabouts and not feel concerned. It’s almost impossible to picture him contented and happy somewhere, not when he has spent his life pulling the plug on anything that looked like it was about to be remotely successful.

  She remembers Matt, age thirteen, proudly presenting his report card to them. He had been graded ‘C’ for every subject. ‘C’ meant average, he declared, and he seemed as proud of that fact – of the universal averageness of his grades – as he had ever been of anythi
ng. It was as if being average was a new pinnacle of achievement, as if it beat, hands down, the straight ‘A’s that Tim had been getting. Ken had disowned him over that report card, had told him he was no longer his son. Which was harsh, admittedly. But they had wanted him to do better, that was all. They had been afraid for him, even then.

  Alice sips her tea and remembers Matt’s graduation from university. Or rather the absence of his graduation. How she had been looking forward to that! She takes a teaspoon and taps the rounded back of it against a thumbnail. Yes, thinking about Matt makes her nervous. Sometimes, it makes her feel short of breath. Occasionally she fears that she’s slipping into an actual panic attack.

  “Don’t think about him then,” Ken tells her if she ever admits that she can’t breathe properly. “Think about Tim instead.” And of course, Tim has done so much better than Matt. But for some reason, thinking about Tim doesn’t make her feel that much happier, and it definitely doesn’t stop her worrying about the other one.

  “It’s over!” Ken shouts from the lounge. “You can reclaim your sitting room. The coast is clear!”

  “Oh joy!” she murmurs. She glances at the clock. It’s almost time for Coronation Street.

  ***

  It’s the day of the funeral, and Ken, wearing black suit trousers and a white singlet, is at the top of the stairs looking down. “Where’s my shirt?” he asks.

  “Oh, I tied it to the television aerial,” Alice replies. “It seemed like a good idea at the time.”

  “The television aerial? What?”

  Alice sighs. “It’s in the wardrobe with all your other shirts.”

  “The white one’s not there.”

  “It is.”

  “Only it isn’t.”

  Alice tuts and climbs the staircase. It’s nine already and they should have left by now. She crosses the bedroom to the open wardrobe, swipes the shirt from the rack and pushes it into her husband’s arms as she leaves the room.

  “Huh,” Ken exclaims. “... must’ve been hiding.”

  “Only from you,” Alice murmurs, pausing on the landing. “Now can we please get a move on? You know how stressed you get when we’re late anywhere. All we need is a bit of traffic or some bad weather and–”

  “We’re sure to get plenty of both,” Ken says, now buttoning the shirt.

  “I know,” Alice says. “That’s my point.”

  By the time Ken has checked the locks and looked for the map, by the time he has found and jingled his keys, then lost them and then found them again, it’s ten a.m. “Ken!” Alice protests, one hand on the latch. “We’re really going to be late.”

  “We won’t,” Ken says. “It’s easy to make up a bit of time on a long journey like this one.”

  At the end of the street, as Ken waits to pull out into the traffic, Alice spots a length of tinsel draped across the top of the “open” sign in the Chinese take away.

  A minute later, as they drive past the golf course – transformed into a lake by all the rain – she asks, “So how do I find out if Tim is inviting us for Christmas without sounding like I want him to invite us?”

  She glances at Ken enquiringly and he turns to face her just long enough for her to start to feel nervous. “Please look at the road occasionally,” she says.

  “Don’t start that already. We’ve barely left the house.”

  “I’m sorry. But the idea of your ploughing two tonnes of Megane into a shop full of people makes me slightly nervous. I’m funny that way.”

  “Don’t you want to?”

  “Want to what?”

  “To go to Tim’s place? For Christmas?”

  “I suppose so,” Alice says. “Compared to the alternatives, I suppose it’s preferable.”

  “What alternatives?”

  “Well, there’s always the Dignitas clinic in Switzerland. But I still prefer Tim’s place, I think. Just about.”

  “If you want to go then just ask him. Why does everything have to be so complic–”

  “I don’t want him to feel obliged, is all,” Alice interrupts. “And Natalya was very frosty last year. Do you remember how frosty she was? Actually, frosty’s not the word. She was arctic. She was ant-arctic.”

  “Yeah,” Ken says, vaguely. He’s momentarily distracted by the heavy traffic on the roundabout.

  Alice runs a film of last Christmas through her mind’s eye. And yes, Natalya had been very prickly. She had left the sprouts that Alice had prepared in the fridge – a special River Cottage recipe with chestnuts it had been, too. She had “forgotten” to defrost the chocolate log they had brought as well. Fridges and freezers – that’s how chilly things had been.

  “You know, she never once wore that scarf I bought her,” Alice says. In fact, it’s a general rule that nothing Alice and Ken have ever given them has ever been seen again. Perhaps she has a black hole in her chest-of-drawers, Alice thinks. Perhaps it just sucks things up and casts them into a parallel universe where they join Ken’s missing socks.

  “Not that you know of,” Ken comments, checking his mirror as they merge onto the A38.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I’m just saying that as we’re not with them twenty-four hours a day, it’s hard to be certain that she has never worn the scarf.”

  But Alice is certain. She’s perfectly certain. And it was a nice scarf, too. A very nice turquoise cashmere scarf. If Natalya didn’t want it, then she would have liked to have worn it herself. It’s particularly galling when you give people nice gifts – things that you don’t dare to buy for yourself – only to see that they never use them.

  Perhaps it’s because Tim and Natalya are so well off these days. Perhaps anything Alice and Ken buy just pales into insignificance against the rest of their wealth. Perhaps they need to up their game this year, gift-wise. Then again, it’s not like Natalya makes much effort. She gives Alice a bottle of perfume every year without fail, and it’s never even perfume that Alice likes. She only wears Lancôme’s Beauty Parisienne, and she’s told Natalya that enough times. Though never at Christmas. That would be rude. Alice has lost count of how many full bottles of perfume she’s given to Dot, how many she’s taken to the Oxfam shop.

  “Well, I still think she was a bit off last year. Tim was funny too. Do you remember all that fuss about the missing champagne glasses? As if it mattered what kind of glasses we were drinking out of.”

  “It was very expensive champagne apparently,” Ken says.

  “Oh it taste so dee-fferrent from prroper glass," Alice says, rolling the ‘R’s, mocking Natalya’s Russian accent.

  “I think they were just getting on each other’s nerves. It happens in a marriage. Especially at Christmas.”

  And yes, it’s true. It happens in a marriage. Ken has been getting on her nerves for fifty years now and no doubt vice-versa. She wonders, again, why Ken was so determined to marry her. It hadn’t been for her wit, that’s for sure. He can barely tolerate that. She had been pretty enough, she supposes. But there had been prettier girls out there. It’s a strange one, because she’s never been able to detect much pleasure in the arrangement, not on Ken’s side. Not on either side, really.

  Marrying Ken had not been Alice’s first choice. In fact, it hadn’t really felt like a choice at all. Her grandparents (who she never met – they had died by the time she was born) were Jews who had fled Russia in the late 1800s. They had arrived in Norwich and then the Midlands as penniless refugees.

  Despite widespread myths about the wealthy, successful, business-like nature of the Jewish people, they had remained pretty much paupers their whole lives, right up until their premature deaths in their forties. Poverty and persecution do not a long happy life make, it would seem.

  Alice’s own parents, her mother no longer officially Jewish (she had seen how dangerous that could be) and her father of Irish extraction, had suffered terrible deprivation during their childhoods and had barely managed to drag themselves out of the gutter by the time Alice came
along. Her father was a street cleaner, so in some ways, he was still very much in the gutter.

  Though Alice herself had never known hunger, she had grown up with the terrifying all-pervading knowledge that poverty was never far away. Her parents had lived as if destitution were imminent, hoarding tins of food in the cellar and worrying, to the point of near-insanity, about every political upheaval, every downturn, every distant conflict... It didn’t take much, they told their children, over and over, for everything good to vanish. All it took was an injury or an illness, or another economic depression – all that was needed was another Alexander the Third, or another Hitler for that matter, and they’d all be scrabbling around in the dirt all over again.

  By the time Alice hit nineteen they had been pushing her to marry for a while. Marriage was about the only hope that people like her parents had for their daughters, and they were concerned, unnerved, by the lack of suitable suitors and by her ever-deepening friendship with Joe. Joe who came from the wrong side of the tracks in so many ways.

  Alice wonders where Joe is now. She wonders if Joe is even still alive, wonders whether Joe went on to have the exceptional life that Alice always imagined.

  And then Alice came home one night from the soap factory, the stink of fat and lye still on her clothes, and there was Ken, leaning on the mantelpiece, fiddling with a pocket-watch, looking suave. Her parents were smiling nervously up at her, being – what’s that word? – obsequious, that’s the one. Ken had seemed bright-eyed and smart in his Sunday best – he had always been a snappy dresser – and he’d been polite and generous towards her, even enabling, insisting, that she quit that horrible factory job. Yes, he had been nice enough, at least at the outset.

  People complain about the Muslims and what-have-you, complain that they arrange their marriages, that they hang people, that they still treat homosexuals badly, that they don’t give women proper rights; but it really wasn’t that long ago that all those things happened here. People pretend to have forgotten these things because it makes them feel better, it makes them feel superior. But Alice remembers.