Your Father Sends His Love by Stuart Evers Page A

straight out again if it’s like this,’ she says.
    He moves his hands up from her hips, attempts to unfurl the knot of her towel.
    â€˜And don’t start that now,’ she says. ‘I need to get to the shops before they close.’ The mother-voice again.
    Evie’s kiss is swiftly finished and kills any hope Ross might have that she’ll throw the towel to the floor. He watches her walk across the landing to the bathroom and as she feels him watching, her gait slows. She looks back over her shoulder, flashes a pin-up girl smile and closes the door.
    In the small bathroom two condoms are draped over the lip of the wash-hand basin. She throws them into thesmall bin and washes herself. The room smells of urine deep in the carpet pile, toothpaste, lemon zest from the soap. Her jeans and blouse are folded on the toilet seat. She pulls them on quickly. Ross walks past the bathroom door; she can hear the hem of his jeans scuffing the cheap carpet. She waits and hears the soft thump of music in the next room. She ties back her hair, picks up her small bottle of perfume and unlocks the door.
    Ross is sitting on the corduroy sofa, drinking the wine she spurned on arrival, his jeans low on his hips. Woodchip walls, books on brick-and-plank shelves, papers spread across a glass coffee table, a portable television, a record player.
    â€˜I hate you leaving,’ he says as she applies perfume. ‘I wish you could stay for ever.’
    â€˜No you don’t,’ she says. ‘You’d like to think that, but you don’t.’
    He stands. He is not as tall as her husband, but fills space more effectively. Even in an empty room he could never be coy.
    â€˜Sometimes you scare me, Evelyn,’ he says. ‘You know that?’
    But she just smiles – you cheeky boy – as she picks up her handbag from the armchair and checks for her purse and car keys. He drinks his wine. He is the only man she knows who drinks wine.
    She points at the glass. ‘You keep on like that and you’ll get flabby,’ she says. ‘The women won’t flock to you then. When you’re fat and flabby.’
    Know a lover’s weak spots better even than their erogenous zones – a tip from a magazine. As a child and youth, Ross had been an improbable kind of fat – like a body inflated with sausage meat : his own description. Everyone called him Chip Shop. Not everyone, he realized even as he told her this, but enough to make it feel so. They said he smelled of the deep-fat fryers his father owned and operated. They said he smelled of fish. It was, he told her, better than being called Yid.
    â€˜I only drink when I’m with you,’ he says. For a man proud of his acumen, he says things like this too often.
    â€˜Well it’s best I leave now, then. Before you turn fat and unlovable.’
    He shakes his head and drains the glass.
    â€˜Must you do this every time?’ he says.
    â€˜Do what?’
    â€˜You know . . . this,’ he says windmilling his arms, the tiny red heart in the wineglass jumping. ‘This . . . decompressing.’
    â€˜What does that even mean?’ she says.
    â€˜You know exactly what it means,’ he says. Evie moves towards him, leans in, kisses him, holds her right hand to his left cheek.
    â€˜You credit me with far too much intent, Ross. It’s endearing.’
    He kisses her in a violent manner he is only now learning to enjoy.
    â€˜I’ll call you,’ she says. ‘I don’t know when. But I will.’
    â€˜I’m supposed to be waiting?’ he says. ‘For more of the same?’
    â€˜If you have the time, yes,’ she says.
    â€˜Time’s running out, I keep telling you this,’ he says.
    â€˜I know,’ she says, walking to the door. ‘The bombs could drop at any time.’

    Evie closes Ross’s front door in soft afternoon light and follows the row of doors – all the same shade