What Becomes by A. L Kennedy

– bloody Edgbaston – it was bad enough living there by ourselves – arsehole bloody schoolkids hanging around – little pothead wankers and skinny, horsey tarts who throw up all the time. And their arsehole bloody parents.
    And
her
arsehole bloody parents.
You’re from Cumbernauld? Oh, well
.
    Can’t go and stay with the Ma, though. All settled in Brodick – sea views and Dad scattered on the beach. Worked himself hollow to buy me an education, the start of a life where this shite wouldn’t happen. Oh, well. Can’t even tell the Ma how things turned out. America? It all went tits up. Oh, well. Government bailed the banks out, but not us. Oh, well. First hired, first fired, crucifying fucking mortgage and not citizens. Oh fucking, fucking, well.
    No swearing, though. And positive. We won’t be homeless.
    We’ll be in Edgbaston.
    They let each other go when the waitress clears their table and returns with plates of minute rectangular desserts – two pink, two cream, two chocolate brown with a brush of gold leaf on the top.
    â€˜We should scrape it off and save it.’ Although saying so makes Tom feel hemmed in rather than jovial. ‘Gold – the only stuff that’s worth anything. Should have bought shares.’
    Elaine slowly puts her fork into the pink, lifts up a beautiful fragment and eats. ‘God, it’s wonderful. Sort of a mousse, or something. Very strawberry.’
    They both manage the pink and the cream and softly agree they were ridiculously, unnecessarily fine and then they stare at the chocolate and the flakes of gold.
    â€˜Confectioner’s gold. Is there such a thing?’ Elaine remembers she read somewhere that the secret way to win your man is by asking him questions and not knowing answers, deferring to the wisdom he wants you to prove he has. But Tom isn’t like that.
    â€˜Well, if there is, we’ve got some.’
    Elaine hears his voice getting thinner, stressed. Tom her man, Tom who’s snuffling and wiping his face with the heel of his hand, who’s too much a boy. She tells him, as if this might cheer him up, ‘I bet people come in here all the time and just order it. Plate of gold, please.’ Tom the boy who is a lecturer, letters after the name and a Dr in front – Tom who is still always waiting to be found out – she never has made him any more secure than that. ‘Plate of gold. Like eating money.’
    â€˜Like eating something better than money.’
    Tom clears his throat, readies his forefinger and thumb, flexes, picks up the soft chocolate between them and puts it all into his mouth, lets it warm, melt, cloy. He doesn’t chew, only swallows and so tomorrow he’ll be partly gold. He’ll incorporate it, never let it go.
    Or else this is just a waste. An intolerable waste.
    There’s something like fright in him, vertigo. He watches Elaine’s face, something about her expression which is brave: small and courageous and enough to make him bleed, shout, touch her, although he does none of those things, only watches as she picks up the last of their meal, repeats his gestures, studies the shape and then eats it, swallows gold.
    Afterwards, they head for the park, the sun dropping fast through the afternoon, already striking fire in the highest windows of the mountainous apartment blocks. Elaine sees her husband tread across a tangle of long shadows, then lean against the tree that cast them. He appears to be almost relaxed. The size of him – almost clumsy, but he never is – and the line of his back: when it softens he can seem like he used to be, the last three years driven off, cured. Maybe this is the secret way to keep her man – never look at his face.
    Almost clumsy.
    Sometimes completely clumsy. I used to think I’d say something – that there are nights when he’d want to please me, but he already had. Anxious fingers. Insisting. Too