Wolves by Simon Ings Page A

goggles.
    ‘You’re getting there.’
    ‘How?’
    ‘You’re turning your head to follow the torch.’
    ‘I am?’
    ‘Yes.’
    Like everybody else, Michel imagined that once you invented something like this – something worth an article or two, a local headline – then a grateful world would see to it that you were properly recompensed. Michel thought Dad’s work explained how we’d ended up running this sprawling hotel.
    But the hotel – this great, absurd shell, vanishing year by year behind walls of tangled and untended green – had been Mum’s waste of money, not Dad’s. The guests didn’t have too bad a time of it, but the rooms we lived in were cold, draughty and uncomfortable and there were too many of them. There were rooms no-one went into from one year to the next – rooms Dad warned me to stay out of because of some newly discovered dereliction: faulty electrics, or spreading damp.
    We put Dad’s gear away and I led Michel upstairs to my room. Michel paused on the landing, looking up the stairwell at the light escaping from Mum’s apartment at the top of the house. The light was strange up there: pools of taupe and rose spilling from desk lamps draped with hand-dyed silk. Mum was flirting with arson again. We heard furniture being shifted around.
    ‘Who’s up there?’
    ‘That’s Mum. She’s sorting out her stock.’ Bags of cosmetic-grade glitter. Clear plastic boxes full of sequins. Rolls of cloth. Reams of hand-made paper. Boxes of ribbon. An easel. Bags of unopened paints. She was saying she was going to sell it all. I couldn’t imagine how.
    She was going off to the protest camp again – the third summer in a row. Her ambitions for it were more realistic this year. At any rate, more muted. She no longer expected the camp to transform her life. She no longer imagined that it would ever save the world. She just wanted to see her friends.
    The militants, on the camp’s other side, had been edged off their narrow purchase, their tents and shelters grubbed up, and boulders dumped between the trees to stop them reoccupying the space. They had adopted other causes, other interests. Squats and demonstrations. Agitprop. The women Mum camped among were too remote to matter much, and the authorities had left them alone. They were not as doctrinaire as they had been. ‘You can come and see me,’ Mum had said to me – as if I could ever be persuaded to go there again.
    ‘Jesus,’ said Michel, entering my room. ‘Is this all yours?’
    ‘Well, it’s my room,’ I said. ‘The furniture belongs to the hotel, really. Apart from that .’ I pointed at the dressing table – the mirrored table Dad had bought Mum as a wedding present. This was the table which was supposed to make Mum feel like Gloria Swanson whenever she sat at it to make herself up for evenings of parties and premières. Life takes its own path, of course, and now the table was mine. Mum didn’t want it any more. Since her hospital spell she had lost her liking for mirrors.
    The dressing table drawers opened stiffly, crammed to jamming with photographs in yellow paper wallets.
    While I rifled through them, Michel waited on the white-painted bench that ran round the bay window. It was massively uncomfortable to sit on. The cushions slid about on the paint so that you were always slipping off. Still, visitors here invariably headed straight for it, suckered, I suppose, by the novelty of the thing. Squirming for purchase, determined to enjoy his window-seat moment, Michel studied the photographs as I handed them to him.
    ‘Here they are.’
    The water meadows captured in our family snaps were buried now, beneath the asphalt and paving of the housing estate. There, in their perfectly square bungalow, under its red-tile pyramidal roof, Michel lived with his mother.
    Michel wanted to know how ground water had moved about the meadows, before the builders canalised it, piped it, buried it under chicanes and driveways and