Something to Tell You Read Free Page A

terrifying! But I haven’t slept with a woman properly for five years.”
    “Is that all? It’ll return, your appetite. You know that.”
    “It’s too late. Isn’t it true that a person incapable of love and sex is incapable of life? Already I’m smelling of death.”
    “That odour is your lunch. In fact, I suspect your appetite has already come back. That’s why you’re so restless.”
    “If it doesn’t, it’s goodbye,” he said, drawing his finger across his throat. “That’s not a threat, it’s a promise.”
    “I’ll see what I can do,” I said, “in both matters.”
    “You’re a true friend.”
    “Leave the entertainment to me.”

CHAPTER TWO

    Early evening, and my last patient gone into the night, having endeavoured to leave me his burden.
    Now someone is kicking at the front door. My son, Rafi, has called for me. The boy lives a couple of streets away with his mother, Josephine, and comes plunging round on the scooter we bought at Argos with his PSP, trading cards and football shirts in his rucksack. He is wearing a thick gold chain around his neck, a dollar sign hanging from it. Once he told me he felt tired if he wasn’t wearing the right clothes. His face is smooth and a little smudged in places, with scraps of food dotted around his mouth. His hair is razor-cropped, by his mother. We touch fists and exchange the conventional middle-class greeting, “Yo, bro—dog!”
    The twelve-year-old tries to hide his head when he sees me because he’s just the right height to be grabbed, but where can you hide a head? I want to kiss and hold him, the little tempest, and smell his boy flesh, pulling him to the ground and wrestling with him. His head is alive with nits, and he squints and squirms, with his father so pleased to see him, saying hopefully, “Hello, my boy, I’ve missed you today, what have you been doing?”
    He shoves me away. “Piss off, don’t touch me, keep away, old man—none of that!”
    We’re going to eat and find company, and since I’ve been a single man, the place to do that is Miriam’s.
    Rafi has some juice, and we exchange CDs. On the way to Miriam’s, we drive past Josephine’s house, the place he left earlier, slowing down. Josephine and I have been separated for eighteen months. We had stayed together because of our shared pleasure in the kid, because I feared years of TV dinners, and because, at times, we liked the problem of each other. But in the end we couldn’t walk down the street without her on one side, me on the other, shouting complaints across the road. “You didn’t love me!” “You were cruel!” The usual. You don’t want to hear about it, but you will, you will.
    I doubted whether she’d be at home, or even that a light would be on, as she had begun to see someone. I had deduced this from the fact that a couple of weeks ago Rafi had turned up at my house wearing a new Arsenal shirt with HENRY on the back. He looked shifty already, and required no confirmation that no son of mine was coming in the house wearing that. We had honourable, legitimate reasons for being Manchester United fans—to be explained at length later—and he did take the shirt off, replacing it with the more respectable GIGGS top he’d left in his room. Neither of us mentioned the Arsenal shirt again, and there was no addition to the kit. The boy loved his father, but whether he’d have been able to resist a trip to Highbury with a strange man who fancied his mother was another matter. We would see.
    We were both aware that she required him out of the way, staying with me, in order to see her boyfriend. At such times we felt homeless, abandoned. I guess we were both thinking of what she was doing, of the hope and happiness not directed at us when she was with her new lover.
    How could we not drive past, looking? When I see her in my mind, she is standing on the steps of that house, tall, unmoving and unreachable, as though she had put her self far away, where no one