Starting Over

I smiled. ‘Right,’ I said. It was so blatantly untrue that I had to admire his front. ‘Just try to get some in your mouth next time.’

Then there was that sudden flare of outrage, the easy outrage that is the natural habitat of the teenage boy. ‘You don’t believe anything I say, do you?’ he said.

‘Volume lower,’ I said. ‘Your mother and sister are sleeping.’

‘Not a word of it,’ he said, shaking his head at the AlcoHawk. ‘Not a bloody word.’

I sighed. ‘But, Rufus,’ I said, shaking my head with wonder at his ability to stand there stinking like a brewery and lie to my face, ‘I can smell it.’

‘But I didn’t drink it,’ he said. ‘They threw it. They chucked beer at me, Dad.’

He had lost me. ‘They did what? Who are you talking about? Who are they?’

‘It doesn’t matter,’ he said, although I could tell it mattered more than anything.

And I looked at my son, this great gawky monster, this thin-skinned stranger, and I willed myself to see the mophaired boy he had once been, the boy I could hug and who would hug me back, and who would not pull away.

‘What happened to us, Rufus? We were mates, weren’t we? Do you remember when you were little? We went to the park. We went to the football. We went to Legoland. Remember Legoland?’

‘Legoland? Yeah, I was carsick. Puked all the way to Windsor.’

‘But you enjoyed yourself once you were there. Remember? Once we had cleaned you up a bit. What happened?’

He snorted, looked away. ‘Yeah, well. I grew up.’

Was that it? Was that all it was? Really? The gap that opens up between the father and the son as the years go by? Was it really only natural? I couldn’t believe it. I felt that somewhere along the line I had taken a wrong turn, and that’s why I had lost him.

‘It’s not easy,’ he said. ‘Having a copper for a father. Somebody everyone seems to know. Always getting compared. Always getting measured. Being your father’s son and nothing more. Always seen that way.’ He smiled bitterly. ‘Living in your famous shadow.’

I shook my head. ‘I’m not famous,’ I said. ‘Bill Gates is famous. Brad Pitt is famous. The Dalai Lama…You should be grateful the Dalai Lama is not your father. I’m not famous.’

‘Oh, but you are,’ he said. ‘On a local level. Everyone round here knows who you are. Or who you were, before you got ill. You’re famous in that modern, micro-celebrity sort of way.’

‘You’re too kind.’ I poured myself a large measure of red. Then suddenly there was concern on his face.

‘What’s wrong?’ he said.

‘Nothing,’ I said. ‘A bit of a rotten night. Probably the drugs. They tend to swing your moods around. Don’t worry. Just a lousy night. Like you. Or did you think that you invented lousy nights?’

He still had the AlcoHawk Pro in his hand. I indicated what was left of the red wine.

‘You want a drop of this? They told me not to drink. But I’m really tired of being told what to do. You ever feel like that?’

Rufus shook his head. ‘I don’t drink, Dad. It’s not my thing.’

He put down the AlcoHawk Pro. I looked at him for a long time.

‘Then where do you go?’ I asked him.

And he told me.

When he had finished I gave him one of my clumsy hugs and he gave me one of his awkward squeezes in return and I left him in the kitchen, foraging for food and making a racket.

Upstairs in the bedroom the lights were all off, but my wife was still awake, and waiting for me.

I was jolted awake long before dawn.

This was not me. I had always slept like a baby. I don’t mean like a real baby – waking up wet and screaming every two hours – but like the sleeping baby of myth, comatose from lights out to breakfast. Especially after sex. But not tonight. Not any more. And, I somehow understood, never again.

I lay there for a while, dry-mouthed from the red wine, listening to Lara’s breathing, and then, knowing there would be no more sleep for me tonight, I silently made my way downstairs.

Hunched over my wife’s laptop in the kitchen, the only light coming from the glow of the computer screen, I joined my brothers and sisters. All those people who had been in death’s departure lounge, and then had their journey cancelled just before boarding. God had thrown another log on my fire, wrote one man.

Men and women, adults and children, in every corner of the planet. And as I bent before the computer’s light, I learned what we shared was that we had all been saved by the unimaginable kindness of some unknown stranger. And we shared something else. We had not only been saved. We had been changed. Oh, how we had been changed.

Changed in ways that you can imagine. And changed in ways that were beyond all imagining.

‘I am a Frankenstein,’ cried Louis Washkansky upon waking as the world’s first heart transplant recipient in Cape Town, South Africa, in the month of December, 1967. ‘I am a Frankenstein.’

‘Not a Frankenstein,’ said his nurse. ‘But an angel.’

I turned off the computer. There was still no light from the world outside as I went back up to bed. My family slept on. And my heart leapt to my throat when I saw him as I passed the darkened bathroom – the hair uncut and unkempt, the eyes bright and wild, not a gram of fat on his stubbled face, the flesh just fallen away. It was a face to make your heart leap in the middle of the night.

And it took me a long second to see that I was staring at myself.

seven (#ulink_e34b4701-1d29-5be0-80bb-c171c1a720a8)

I was standing in front of the mirror in the bedroom, my shirt open, looking at the scar on my chest again. It was a long, livid, red wound, as though someone had tried to saw me in half, starting at the top. My fingers moved to touch it and I remembered touching the scar on my wife’s stomach after the birth of our boy. The world had marked me, as it had marked her, as if to signal that one kind of life had ended and another kind of life had begun. I started to button my shirt and Lara appeared in the doorway.

‘The cab here?’ I said.

‘We’re not getting a cab,’ she said, and got this little secret smile.

The bicycles were waiting in the hall, propped against the wall. Ruby’s pink trekking bike, still caked with fresh mud, and Rufus’ big black Saracen Dirtrax, three years old but shining like it had just come out of the box. Sometimes you give a kid a present and they have outgrown it before it is unwrapped.

I looked at the bikes and I looked at my wife. ‘Oh, you’ve got to be kidding me,’ I said.

‘It’s good for you,’ she said, and squeezed my arm. ‘And you’re ready.’ She gave me a wink. ‘Know what I mean, big boy?’