Wolves by Simon Ings Page B

mini-roundabouts. He wanted to know what the land would look like once the estate fell apart, as it surely would one day. The End Times were on their way. He was convinced of this. He was trying to work out what life would be like here, after the Fall. He liked to imagine himself preparing for disaster, steadily, calmly, over years. He imagined himself holed away in some brake in the woods, his life made rich and strange by its privations and narrow compass.
    Still, after Michel’s recent run-in with the school, I couldn’t altogether shake off the suspicion that, as he worked through our photographs, he was actually studying me. My bobble hat. My pantaloons and pushchair. Mum’s hand in mine, pulling me to attention. ‘I’d better start cooking. Dad will be home in half an hour.’
    We went downstairs and Michel sat at the kitchen table, watching me chop vegetables. He had this intense look – you’d think I was performing surgery. ‘You can cook,’ he said.
    Dad had one of those Japanese knives; the weight of the blade did all the work. You just had to mind your fingers. It was the easiest thing in the world to cut up a few vegetables, throw them in a tray and bung them in the oven. The fish went on top about fifteen minutes before we sat down to eat.
    ‘You cook fish,’ he said.
    ‘Do you like fish?’
    ‘Sure.’
    It felt good to have found something I could do and that Michel couldn’t.
    Dad walked into the kitchen and dropped his briefcase by the piano. ‘Hello,’ he said, in the voice he used with our guests, and gave a reserved-judgement smile. The photographs were spread out on the dinner table. ‘Goodness. Conrad. You’re showing off your baby pictures?’
    Mum came down to eat with us more or less when I called her. She wasn’t usually so accommodating.
    Dad asked her, ‘What time is your train tomorrow?’
    ‘After eleven.’
    ‘After eleven?’
    ‘Quarter past eleven. Eleven twenty. Eleven twenty-one at the third beep.’
    ‘I can run you down in the car, but you’ll be waiting there a while.’
    ‘You can run me down in the car?’
    ‘I can run you over.’
    ‘You can run me over?’
    ‘Do you want me to give you a lift or not?’
    ‘No, Ben, it’s okay.’
    ‘You’ll have to make your own way to the station then. I need the car. I’ll be leaving around eight.’
    I said to Michel, by way of explanation, ‘Mum’s off on a protest.’
    ‘Sara,’ Dad said, ‘is going to get herself cold, wet, scared, arrested and very probably beaten.’
    ‘Jesus Christ, Dad.’
    ‘Certainly kettled. Hosed. Maybe gassed.’
    Mum joined in, mimicking him. ‘Blinded. Blown up.’
    There was an awkward silence as Mum and Dad remembered, far too late, what I’d told them about Michel’s family.
    Michel looked from me to Dad and back again. ‘What? You want me to say “beheaded”?’
    ‘Let’s all calm down,’ Dad said.
    ‘Let’s not,’ said Mum.
    I said, ‘Let’s just eat the fucking fish I caught.’
    ‘ Caught ?’
    ‘Cooked. Let’s eat the fucking fish I cooked.’
    ‘Does this sort of thing run in the family?’ Michel asked Mum, trying to jolly things along, to give as good as he was getting, to join in.
    Mum said, ‘You wouldn’t believe the things that run in this fucking family.’
    ‘Enjoy your tent that I paid for,’ Dad said.
    ‘I bloody will, Ben. Thanks.’
    When he left (by the front entrance, off to the housing estate and his widowed mum’s bungalow) Michel said to me, with admiration, ‘She’s quite a character, your mum.’
    The following morning I traipsed after Mum to the station, ‘helping her with her bags’, breathing in her second-hand smoke. She had no time for my preferred, round-about way into town. ‘I need to get going.’ She had us cut straight across the estate.
    Our hotel used to have a view. I remember clover. Watercress. (Peppery – it made me sneeze.) Now even the water was gone: canalised, buried deep, a maze. I remember them