Chemistry and Other Stories Read online

  Doug’s mum took a sip of hers. ‘Not too bad,’ she said. ‘I’ve had worse.’

  ‘If a company making coffee this bad can prosper, what’s the point? Why not have a planned economy and … what d’you say? You’ve had worse?’

  ‘I didn’t say it was great,’ Doug’s mum said. ‘What do you expect in a place like this? Use your eyes. It’s not exactly Pret A Manger, is it?’ He’d upset her. What a tosspot he was. She’d taken offence. She stood, and picked up his cup. ‘I’ll take it back and complain for you,’ she said.

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘I mean, I can do it.’

  ‘I think you probably can’t,’ she said, and was away. Jim looked around. He was the only male in the entire place over the age of four. Maybe the weird taste in the coffee had been caused by a chemical reaction between caffeine and oestrogen. Having a baby was a good way to meet women; he should have thought of it much earlier in his life. If he was the kind of man turned on by lactating, postnatal women. No doubt some men were.

  He’d dropped Lily at nursery that morning and driven to the park. The dogs had yapped with excitement while he got Fred out of his car seat and into the buggy. When he let them out the cocker nearly knocked the buggy over and the springer almost jerked him off his feet in her eagerness to run free. He pushed the buggy while the dogs pulled him, out of the car park. On the grass he let them off their leads. The buggy was a three-wheeler Sarah had ordered for him. ‘You can run with it,’ she said. ‘It’ll keep you fit. Help you get rid of that.’ ‘That’ being his paunch, the result of being unable to let children’s leftover food go to waste. He called it thrift. Others called it greed. He was probably one of those roly-poly toys himself now. Push him over and he’d roll upright.

  He jogged past the football pitches but had to keep stopping: the dogs crapped twice each. Thankfully he’d remembered to bring a roll of black plastic poo bags with him. He used four, tied up and deposited in the red bins scattered around the park. Fred slept; back at the car he woke up. The dogs were energised by their exercise, and barked in the back while he changed Fred’s nappy on the rear seat. What had possessed them to get puppies at the same time as their babies were born? Jim had a vague memory that it was his idea. He strapped Fred in the baby seat, then sat behind the wheel and closed his eyes. The sun was trying to shine. His mind was empty for a lovely moment. Then he opened his eyes and switched on the ignition.

  Supermarket trolleys with a little wire seat for the baby just in front of the handle, now there was a brilliant invention! Jim pushed Fred through the fruit and veg section. He hoped the inventor had patented his or her design and got something for it for every shopping trolley in every supermarket in the world. A penny, a cent. He wouldn’t begrudge that genius his or her millions. Fred reached towards black grapes and Jim plucked a cluster for him. Jamie Oliver wrote in one of his cookery books that he’d never buy fruit without tasting it: if anyone challenged Jim on this, he had his cookery guru as an alibi.

  They rolled along the aisles. Jim felt for the shopping list in his back pocket. It wasn’t there. What an idiot. It must be in the car; or still on the kitchen table at home. He could probably remember everything. Toilet paper, kitchen roll, washing powder. Pasta, rice, the staples. Oh, and those little sausages Lily likes. Rice cakes: they look like polystyrene and taste like it too. When Fred or Lily left fragments uneaten, he threw them in the bin. He had standards, however low. Where were the damned things? They used to be next to the Ryvita.

  ‘Jimbo!’

  He looked up. A thin man carrying a shopping basket stood before him. He knew this man.

  ‘How’s it going, Jim? You’ve got a kid?’

  The man was a similar age to him but his clothes fitted him well, his hair was recently cut. ‘Two, actually, mate, the other one’s at nursery.’

  ‘Cool.’ The guy smiled. He looked like a slightly older yet sharper version of Matt Blake, an old friend he’d not seen in years. They used to go clubbing together, half a dozen of them. ‘Still get to go out much?’ the man asked. It was Matt Blake, of course!

  ‘Much?’ Jim replied. ‘You mean ever? No. You?’

  ‘Sure,’ Matt said. ‘Sometimes. Not as often as we used to. I’m more into sailing these days.’

  ‘Sailing?’

  ‘A few of us share a boat. Moored in Portsmouth. I go out most weekends.’

  ‘Wow.’

  ‘You’ll have to come out on the Solent with us some time,’ Matt said.

  ‘Yes, great, I’d love to. Thanks, that would be brilliant.’

  ‘Well, keep in touch.’

  ‘You too, Matt.’ Jim glanced down at Matt’s basket. Bottle of wine. Cellophane-wrapped steak. Four apples in a punnet. A small carton of milk. ‘Hey,’ Jim said. ‘We had the best times, didn’t we?’

  ‘Sure did, Jimbo,’ Matt said, as they glided past each other along the aisle.

  ***

  Jim loaded the shopping bags on to the back seat of the car. The dogs were in the boot, blessedly content there. Then he pushed the trolley to the cash machine. He’d taken Fred out of the seat and put him in the empty bed of the trolley: the infant stood up, grasping the stiff wire with his little fingers, smiling in a confused way as they rattled over the tarmac, then sat down again.

  There was money available, as he trusted there would be. Sarah earned it and organised it. She’d gone back to work after just six weeks’ maternity leave for both children and Jim had taken over their care. His earnings were sporadic, unpredictable. He’d always been self-employed. The mere consideration of a proper job, an employer, fixed hours, caused him palpitations and shortness of breath. He put the five £20 notes in his wallet and pushed the trolley away from the machine. As he turned, he saw the guy waiting in line behind him was wearing one of those employee tags around his neck. A badge of slavery. And the fool wasn’t even at work. He was proud of his chains!

  Jim bought and sold. He’d had a market stall; he used the internet. Books, antiques, anything really. Everyone knew him: Jim, know someone who’d be interested in this painting? Jim, what’s the best way to sell my old man’s car? Jimbo, how much do you think these vinyl records are worth? He could value any old piece of tat, he knew the price of things. He still didn’t quite understand how he’d failed to turn much profit from this knowledge, those contacts. Laziness, partly, he’d admit to that. Lack of what some people called ambition; what he considered avarice. Not to mention a business plan. Plus people were always letting him down, messing him around. He fell out with them.

  Sarah was steady. She loved work: going to an office, liaising with people, giving presentations, leading her team. She was offered promotions and accepted them.

  ‘They said there’s nothing wrong with it but they’ve done you another one anyway.’ Doug’s mum put the newly frothed, so-called cappuccino, on the red tabletop.

  ‘Thanks,’ Jim said. He sniffed, then sipped it. It was slightly less cloacal than before.

  ‘What’s your partner do, then?’ Doug’s mum asked.

  ‘Wife,’ Jim said, and regretted it. ‘She works in the university.’

  ‘She’s an academic?’

  ‘Admin. Policy unit.’

  Doug’s mum frowned. ‘Policy?’

  There was a certain clever curiosity suggested by her cross-questioning. Doug’s mum wasn’t so bad-looking. Why did intelligence in a woman quicken Jim’s blood? There must be a biological explanation. It held out the promise of quick-witted lovemaking, maybe. A sudden terrifying thought struck him: did Doug’s mum fancy him? Had she invited him here on some kind of date? Women on the make always ask men about their partners, don’t they? Everyone knows that. Get men bemoaning their lot, then seduce them with sympathy.

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Like, climate change policy.’

  ‘In the university?’

  ‘Yes, like, how should the institution respond? What challenges will climate change present?’

  ‘To students?’ Doug’s mum
smiled. ‘To tutors?’

  The woman was relentless. ‘Yeh, kind of what systems need to be in place to deal with it. You know?’

  Doug’s mum shook her head. Unbelievable. She clearly thought – just because he wasn’t articulating it very well – that he didn’t know what his wife did. Except that it was true. He didn’t have a clue, not really. Sarah must have explained it to him. He’d been there when she explained it to others. What a twat. He looked around for Lily. He could see no sign of her.

  ‘How about you?’ he asked.

  ‘Me?’ Doug’s mum said. ‘Have you seen these women with kids and full-time jobs? Up early, back late. Work flat out, dash home, time with the kids, do the housework. They’re fucked.’ She picked up her plastic cup and drained whatever dross was left in it. ‘I’ve got two older ones as well.’

  ‘At school?’

  ‘Yeh. Secondary. Different fathers, see?’

  ‘Okay.’

  ‘I’m on my own again now. Which is a lot fucking better, I can assure you.’ Doug’s mum curled her upper lip. ‘You can’t rely on them.’

  ‘Right,’ Jim said.

  ‘They let you down in the end.’ She made a sort of chuckling, or rather snorting, sound. ‘If not sooner.’

  It took Jim a moment to appreciate that Doug’s mum’s collective they and them no longer denoted kids but now referred to men. Yet who was she addressing? Jim! He was sitting right in front of her! Not only did she not fancy him, she hadn’t even registered him as a male of the species.

  ‘Dougie!’ Doug’s mum yelled suddenly in the direction of the play arena. ‘Leave him, Dougie!’ she screamed, jumping up. Jim looked towards where she was heading and saw her son and another boy wrestling. Two little Toby Jug boys grappling. His daughter had been invited to play with a thug. At least he wasn’t fighting with her.

  Jim looked down at Fred. The boy had woken. He had a strange expression on his face: his eyes were glazed, his lips were soft, and pursed. He appeared to be in some kind of ecstasy; a dopey trance. It struck Jim that he had seen that expression before. He fell back through time, into another warehouse years ago. Dark, with spooling, strobing, multicoloured lights. They’d been dancing for hours, the usual group of them. He went off looking for somewhere to smoke, found Matt sitting on metal stairs outside. He looked like he was dozing. A grey dawn was breaking. He touched Matt’s shoulder. Matt opened his eyes. He had that same glazed, enraptured look. They’d smiled at each other. No words were needed, or would suffice: this was happiness.

  And it really was. Jim thought he’d do it for the rest of his life. How life surprised you. The idea of staying up all night, with children to look after the next day, was laughable. Sleep became the most precious commodity in creation. How sad was that?

  A familiar smell entered Jim’s nostrils. The expression on Fred’s face was caused by the infant rapture of emptying his bowels; deliciously squeezing babyish ordure out of his arse. Jim rootled through the changing bag for a nappy and wipes, and carried his boy to the toilets. To his surprise the disabled one was clean and had a wide and sturdy changing shelf. He changed Fred’s nappy, then realised that he himself needed to pee. He couldn’t leave Fred lying on the shelf on the other side of the room, the boy might roll off.

  What Jim knew he should do was take Fred back out and leave him with Doug’s mum for a moment, come back for a quick piss on his own. So why wasn’t he doing so? Why was he unbuttoning his trousers and yanking them down with one hand while hugging Fred to him with the other? The fact was he didn’t trust her, did he? That was the truth. He didn’t want to leave his little boy with Doug’s mum for two minutes. What was wrong with him?

  Men were too soft to be good parents, weren’t they? Jim remembered his own mother: the sharp smacks, the clarity. He sat Fred on one thigh while he peed sitting down. Fred tried to grab a long cord: an alarm bell for disabled users. Jim batted it out of Fred’s reach. He finished and stood up. It was more difficult to pull his pants and trousers up with one hand than it had been to shovel them down: he had to bend his legs so that the trousers didn’t slide straight back to his ankles when he let go. Fred started kicking and grizzling. The operation was untidy, but he managed it eventually and left the toilet.

  Back out in the warehouse, Doug’s mum was at their table along with her boy, who was crying. Screaming, actually. Was the little hooligan upset by her scolding him before he could beat up the other kid? Had she given him a quick slap?

  Jim put Fred back in his buggy, and secured the straps. He scanned the play arena. There was no sign of Lily. He’d not actually seen her, he admitted, for about ten minutes. A hot shameful flush coursed through him. Words of justification spilled from his brain. I couldn’t see … she wouldn’t stop talking … the coffee … the toilet … I tried …

  ‘Can you keep an eye on him?’ he asked Doug’s mum, and without waiting for an answer jogged towards the scaffolding. He hurled himself into the castellated entry and, bent double, barrelled past children not his own. The entire framework was partitioned into rooms, more or less, leading one to another. The temperature was ten degrees higher than outside. Ladders and slides connected each floor to the one above or below. He scrambled up and down them, an awkward giant in a maze. It was much bigger than he’d realised. He crawled into a space with tiny bumper cars like a minimal-contact dodgems. The drivers screeched and shrieked. Another room had huge bouncy exercise balls that children were shoving with all their might against other children they did not know. They yelled martial cries as they did so. Two black boys seemed to be trying to squash an Asian boy in an exercise-ball sandwich. The boy was winded by each cushioned thump.

  Jim peered into every tunnel. He climbed to the top floor and back down, entering on all fours rooms he’d already been through, growing ever hotter and more desperate. He asked children if they’d seen her. They looked at him with dumb suspicion. What was this sweating adult doing in their realm?

  Eventually he crawled through an opening and came, panting, to a new room on the ground floor in a far corner that he’d not been to before. A child left as he entered. The room was full of hundreds of different-coloured globes, each the size of a cricket ball. It was empty of children now, and though all their raucous noise was only just behind and above him, the room of balls was like a quiet pond. He understood that his daughter was in there, beneath its placid surface.

  Jim dived in. The pond was not deep, and finding himself able to stand he staggered around, making great sweeps of the light balls with his hands and arms. In order to reach right to the ground he had to bend his head under the surface, among the balls, and caught himself taking deep breaths, absurdly, before plunging in. He could not find her. Had he reached right into the corners? He began again, methodically, working his way around the outside of the weird room. Then it happened. He felt something different. A clothed limb. A foot. He dived down and put his arms under the child’s dumpy body and brought it up to the surface and out of the pond of hollow balls. It was Lily, all right. Her eyes were closed. Her body was limp. She had drowned. Here, in this infernal place.

  But as he lifted her higher, Lily opened her eyes. A little sleepily, she looked up at her father, and smiled. The panic that had surged in his veins, the desperate stifling heat as he searched for her, were replaced by a cool breeze of relief that blew through him like some drug of the future, subtly, sweetly overwhelming.

  Jim smiled back, and then he hugged his daughter tight to his paunchy torso, and let himself, let the two of them, swoon backwards into the multicoloured pond.

  Generation to Generation

  When we were children, we knew that the Queen had someone to sit on, and thus warm, her toilet seat before she used it.

  I’ve no idea how we knew this. Maybe it was common knowledge, and one of us overheard an adult mention it. Or perhaps our eldest brother Benny made it up. But even so, when you think about it, it works on so many levels. You picture the act itself, this minion l
owering his or her drawers and sitting on the royal throne, not to fulfil the toilet’s sole function (in fact that is the one thing they must not do, isn’t it? It’s probably a treasonable offence, they could be sent to the Tower), but to impart the body heat of their buttocks to the wooden seat so that Her Royal Highness’s buttocks should not have to suffer that brief chill familiar to us all.

  You picture the minion pulling up their drawers and scurrying away just before the Queen’s arrival. You imagine that Her Royal Highness would not want to pass this lackey, for in doing so she would have, however fleetingly, to acknowledge (if only to herself) what they had just done, and why. Queen Elizabeth the Second would surely prefer not to think about it at all. So this minion would scuttle away, perhaps through some secret back passage. (Yes, that’s pretty funny, I agree, it just came to me.)

  So you’re picturing, also, the strange psychological arena that is the mind of a monarch, and indeed of those around her.

  You picture too a world of class, of privilege, passed on generation to generation, a tradition of finely graded social layers and positions and functions, so to speak. At the top is the Queen. Somewhere at the bottom (ha, ha) is the royal toilet-seat warmer.

  And, of course (perhaps above all), you’re reminded that the Queen, just like every single one of her subjects, is a prisoner of her body, a human animal, and needs to take a daily crap.

  My wife, Alli, works one day a week at the Animal Sanctuary shop. I say ‘works’ but she’s a volunteer, unpaid. A few months ago we were talking and she was saying, ‘Why do we all work like crazy all the hours of the day all the days of the week the grinding toil and run around like maniacs and get to the end of the long day exhausted and sleep badly and get up in the morning and do it all over again?’ She looked at me with eyes too wide. ‘Why?’

  The next day – honestly, the very next day, I think it was – she came home from the plant and said, ‘They called us in for a meeting and said would anyone like to work a four-day week? Is that incredible timing or what?’