The Two of Us Page 13

  Frank has the remote and I ask him to turn down the volume, drawing his attention to his sleeping sister.

  ‘Ah, bless,’ he says, stroking Ivy’s cheek with the back of his index finger. ‘Right,’ he says, pointing the remote at the TV. ‘Shall we turn this shit off?’

  I assume Frank means the TV, and that he is ready to call it a night. But instead he speed-flips through umpteen programmes until he finds a Chuck Norris movie on some obscure satellite channel.

  ‘Bit of Chuck?’ he asks.

  Living with a pregnant girlfriend, it’s not often (in the way it’s not often that Hell holds a snowman-making competition) that I get to drink too much and watch old action flicks on the telly. So why not? I let Frank refill my glass, then I take hold of Ivy’s sleeping hand and settle back into my tiny corner of the sofa. It’s not what I planned (what is?), but as cold Friday nights go, it could be a whole lot worse. Even so, I was up at six thirty this morning, and after this afternoon’s meeting, beer with Joe and wine with Frank, the day has had its way with me. Chuck Norris has kicked, punched, knifed and choked to death barely fifty villains before my own eyes begin to close. I tell Frank I’m calling it a day, and rouse Ivy on the third attempt. Frank volunteers to wash the dishes; Ivy dries and I – determined not to be outdone – insist on putting everything away. There really isn’t room for three people behind the breakfast bar (particularly when one of them is the size of Frank), and it’s a miracle that nothing gets broken during the entire awkward routine.

  Dishes cleaned, dried and stowed, we say our good nights. Frank gives me a buddy punch on the shoulder before giving Ivy a protracted bear hug. He kisses his big sister on the side of her head and tells her he loves her. Ivy tells Frank she loves him too before reaching up on tiptoes to give him a final bedtime smacker. Which is all very coochy-coo for the pair of them, but it’s kind of taken the wind from the sails of my own love boat. If I tell Ivy I love her now, it’s going to look like I’m simply joining in for fear of being left out.

  Friday nights have become baby-book nights. The book is snappily titled Countdown to Your Baby: A week-by-week guide to your changing body and your little one’s development. Every week we read a new chapter; this week it’s chapter 19 and it’s Ivy’s turn to read. She tells me that nerves are forming, connecting our babies’ brains to their muscles and organs. The babies have as many nerves as an adult now, and our newly wired-up babies might jump in response to a shock.

  ‘Like their uncle turning up unexpectedly?’

  ‘Shut up and listen,’ says Ivy.

  ‘I had a flower in my teeth,’ I tell her. ‘And a candle. Not in my teeth, on the table.’

  Ivy holds a shushing finger to her lips. ‘Frank told me.’

  She continues reading. The placenta is fully formed but still growing. Tooth buds are forming inside the babies’ gums. They have tongues. The babies are covered in downy hairs and a waxy substance, which keeps their skin supple. Our babies will be with us in just eighteen weeks, and whilst they are doing just fine for fur, wax and tooth buds, they still don’t have names.

  ‘How about Angus?’

  ‘Bit Scottish,’ says Ivy.

  ‘Hamish, then.’

  Ivy laughs. ‘I like Agatha.’

  ‘And if it’s a boy?’

  ‘How about Dashiell?’

  ‘That’s a name?’

  ‘He wrote The Maltese Falcon.’

  ‘Aggy and Dash,’ I say. ‘I actually like it.’

  Ivy grimaces. ‘I think I hate it.’

  ‘What’s Frank’s boy called again?’

  ‘Freddy,’ she says, sighing. And that’s that moment killed.

  ‘What’s going on with him and . . .?’

  ‘Lois. Frank’s moved out.’

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘Nothing, just . . . stuff.’

  ‘Did he cheat on her?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘She cheated on him?’

  ‘Shh, will you. He’s in the other room.’

  ‘I’m just asking who did the dirty,’ I say in a stage whisper.

  ‘You don’t have to look so amused. It’s just really sad. You should have seen them when they met . . . they were . . . made for each other. Everyone said so.’ Ivy exhales slowly, shaking her head. ‘It’s tragic, just . . . just tragic.’

  ‘I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to . . . you know.’

  Ivy smiles at me. ‘I guess that’s just how life goes sometimes. Things change, people change.’ And she says it with such sincerity and apparent introspection that I experience a tickle of paranoia, as if, at some level, the sentiment also applies to us. I make a note to (paraphrasing Esther) fart less and buy flowers more.

  ‘How long is he going to be here?’ I ask.

  ‘Not for long.’

  ‘How long is that, then?’

  Ivy shrugs. ‘He’s my brother.’

  ‘He’s a nice guy, don’t get me wrong, but that sofa ain’t big enough for the three of us.’ It’s meant to sound jocular, but I’m a bit pissed and it comes out with too much spin on it. ‘We’re going to need a bigger boat,’ I say, trying to lighten the mood.

  ‘You can always sit in the armchair,’ Ivy says.

  Not in my own, I can’t.

  It’s true, Ivy does have an armchair. A piece of junkshop thrift that she personally sanded, glued, filled, varnished and reupholstered with rose-printed velvet. None of which make it any more comfortable – it’s like trying to relax on a skeleton draped with a floral blanket. My armchair on the other hand, is a chocolate-brown recliner with magazine pouch, and it’s stuffed with enough padding to stop a runaway train. You could drop a baby from a third-floor window onto that chair and the little bundle of joy would bounce once then drift off to sleep. We’ve discussed this, of course, but according to Ivy my chair clashes with her rug, curtains and sofa. ‘Leather goes with everything,’ I told her. And – thinking she was being cute, I’m sure – Ivy said, ‘Then it’ll go just fine in the spare room, won’t it?’ I let it go, because that’s what you do, isn’t it. You compromise, bend, accommodate, let stuff go. Which is what I should do now, but (blame Frank) I’ve drunk too much wine for that.

  ‘Not in my own,’ I say out loud

  Ivy looks at me – this again – as if I’ve just disappointed her.

  The spare room is next to ours, and through the thin walls we can hear Frank stumbling and clattering about. Judging by the sudden cacophony of gunfire, explosions and screaming, Frank has just switched on my 42-inch HD TV. So now it’s my turn to do the look of exasperation.

  Ivy gets out of bed, thumps on the wall and shouts, ‘Volume!’ The sound halves, leaving it merely loud. Ivy hits the wall a second time. ‘More!’

  ‘Sorry!’ bellows Frank.

  The volume drops again so that it’s now nothing more than an irritating bass rumble through the plasterboard.

  ‘You didn’t answer my question,’ I say. ‘How long is not long?’

  Ivy climbs back into bed. ‘I don’t know. A week, a couple of weeks, maybe.’

  ‘It’s Christmas in three sodding weeks.’

  ‘Fine, he’ll be out before Christmas.’

  ‘Fine,’ I say.

  Ivy turns out her light. And neither of us says I love you.

  After the Chuck Norris film finished, I heard Frank get out of bed and begin rummaging around. It sounded like he was assembling flat-pack furniture, and it was only when I heard more gunfire and the throb of a familiar, muscular engine, that I realized he had found and plugged in my Xbox and was playing Grand Theft Auto. Ivy, of course, was deep asleep and sawing wood. After Grand Theft Auto, Frank plugged in a shoot ’em up I couldn’t identify, and after that I’m pretty sure it was Resident Evil. I don’t know what time I fell asleep but it wasn’t before two, and as I eventually drifted off my mind was stuck in a scratchy, nagging loop: Ivy and surprise guests, first the babies (it’s okay) and now Frank. My sleep was infested with banal stress dre
ams (locked doors, lost keys, a squeaking chair), and when I wake a little before seven a.m., it’s almost a relief. It’s still dark beyond the curtains, but the clock on Ivy’s side of the bed casts enough light to illuminate her face. She looks like she’s smiling in her sleep, but it might just be that her face is squashed against the pillow. I kiss her cheek, slide out of bed, pull on a pair of jogging bottoms and a T-shirt and creep out of the room.

  I’m sitting on the sofa, sipping a coffee and reading the chapter where Ivy abandoned Catch-22, when Frank shambles into the room in his boxer shorts. And he really is a specimen: heavy bones, thickly muscled, coated in a layer of hard fat and thick fur. When we visited the Lees in Bristol, Ivy called her brother a gibbon, and the half-naked reality is only a small evolutionary step forward – as he stands before me now, yawning and scratching his armpit, Frank looks like something that’s just rolled out of a cave instead of a bedroom.

  ‘Morning, matey,’ he says loudly, and I hold a finger to my lips, point down the corridor to where Ivy is, hopefully, still sleeping.

  Frank makes a silly me shrug-and-grimace, and goes about fixing himself a coffee from the cafetiere. He plods over to the sofa and plonks himself down beside me, crossing his legs underneath himself, one big hairy knee pressed firmly against my thigh. His boxer shorts are agape at the fly and I can see more than I want to through the parted material.

  ‘Morning,’ he says again in a stage whisper. ‘Sleep well?’

  ‘Not entirely,’ I tell him.

  Frank nods as if this is of no real interest to him. ‘What you reading?’ he says, reaching across me to pick up the novel from the arm of the sofa. I close my eyes as his torso fills my vision, and a hair of some description tickles my cheek.

  When I open my eyes again, Frank is inspecting the cover of Catch-22. ‘Classic,’ he says, laughing. ‘Major Major Major Major.’ But I don’t get the joke.

  Frank sips his coffee, scratches his belly, stretches expansively.

  ‘You not cold?’ I ask him. Hopefully.

  ‘Never feel it,’ he says, rubbing a hand over his thatched chest. ‘Tell you what, though, I am Hank Marvin.’

  My mind flashes onto the four expensive sausages I bought last night, for breakfast this morning. ‘There’s cereal in the cupboard,’ I tell him. ‘Help yourself.’

  ‘Might just do that,’ he says, jumping up from the sofa and landing with a thud on the floorboards.

  ‘Cupboard above the sink,’ I tell him. ‘Bowls to the left, spoons in the drawer to your right.’

  Frank selects a box of Bran Flakes and pours a gigantic pile into a bowl. He farts, doesn’t comment.

  ‘Want some?’ he asks, rattling the Bran Flakes at me.

  ‘Not hungry,’ I tell him, which is only partially true. I’m waiting for Ivy to get up so I can make very-expensive-sausage sandwiches.

  Frank pulls open the fridge. ‘Milk, milk, milk,’ he says. ‘Got any full-fat?’

  ‘Only skimmed, I’m afraid.’

  Frank sighs. ‘Fair enou— hold on, snags! Now we’re talking; do you mind?’ he says, slapping the sausages down on the counter.

  ‘Actu—’

  Ivy walks into the room, yawning, rubbing her eyes. ‘Morning, boys.’

  ‘Morning, sis. Fancy a couple of sausages?’

  ‘Amazing,’ says Ivy. ‘Frying pan’s in the cupboard next to the dishwasher.’

  ‘Dishwasher? Would have been useful information last night, don’t you think?’

  ‘It’s more of a dish smasher, these days. Stopped using it after it broke my favourite mug.’

  ‘There’s coffee in the thing,’ I say.

  ‘Not any more there isn’t,’ says Frank. ‘Shall I make more?’

  ‘You’re a star,’ Ivy says to her brother.

  I nearly say something to put the record straight, but the words taste petty in my mouth and I turn them into a long, noisy yawn. Ivy joins me on the sofa. She kisses me on the cheek and winks – a small thing just between us, and it says she is sorry and she forgives me and aren’t we both silly and I’m still her number-one guy. ‘Not eating?’ she says.

  I shake my head. ‘Going for a run.’

  ‘If you can wait half an hour, I’ll come with,’ says Frank.

  He’s cooking the sausages now and the smell of them sizzling in the pan is maddening. I look at Ivy with a conspiratorial, pleading expression and she returns it with a complicit smile and nods her head towards the door.

  ‘I would,’ I say, ‘but if I don’t go now I won’t go at all.’

  ‘Another time,’ Frank says.

  ‘You bet,’ I tell him, but I wouldn’t advise him to bet much.

  I don’t know how long I run for but I’ve covered a heck of a lot of Wimbledon Common, and I am exhausted and breathless when I trot back down our street. I’ve certainly been gone long enough for Frank to finish his breakfast – my breakfast – get a shower and cover his hairy barrel with some clothes. Or so you’d think. I hear a loud thunk as I enter the flat, the sound – it transpires – of the bathroom door closing behind Frank. As if the big hairy brute was peeping through the blinds, waiting for me to stick my key in the lock before running, giggling, to the bathroom. Ivy is lying on the sofa, reading.

  ‘Hey, babe,’ she says, heaving herself into a sitting position and resting Catch-22 on the arm of the sofa.

  While I lean against the doorjamb, stretching, Ivy swings her legs off the sofa and shuffles over to the kitchen area where she picks up a tea towel and fills a pint glass with water. At nineteen weeks pregnant with twins, she looks alarmingly large and moves with corresponding ponderousness.

  ‘Here.’ She hands me the water.

  I drink half of the water in one gulp and use the tea towel to mop the sweat off my face and neck.

  ‘Sorry about the sausages,’ she says, falling back into the sofa. ‘And the boeuf bourguignon.’

  ‘It’s fine,’ I say, going to sit in the armchair.

  ‘Uh huh,’ Ivy says, and she points at the floor in front of the sofa.

  ‘Don’t know why you’re worried about a little sweat,’ I say. ‘It’ll be covered in sick and pee and poo in a few months. Everything will be.’

  ‘Wonderful, isn’t it,’ says Ivy, and she places her hands on my shoulders and begins massaging the muscles. I relax into her hands, and she kisses the back of my neck. In the distance I can hear Frank singing under the shower. I can’t make out the song, but it sounds as if he can at least hold a tune.

  ‘Someone sounds happy,’ I say.

  ‘Bear with him,’ Ivy says. ‘It’s been hard for him. I know he can be a bit of a galoot – a lot of a galoot actually.’

  ‘A galooteus maximus?’

  ‘Yes. Very clever.’ Ivy presses her thumbs into the meat of my neck, working upwards from my shoulders to the base of my skull. ‘Anyway,’ she says, ‘. . . I know you’re not meant to have favourites – brothers and whatnot – but, well, Frank’s mine. Closest in age, and he always stood up for me in school.’

  My scalp and temples tingle under Ivy’s fingers and I emit a low moan, which I hope communicates both that I am listening and that I appreciate what Ivy is doing to my head.

  ‘It was worse in secondary school,’ she says. ‘My scars, you know. In little school, I don’t know, maybe the kids were too innocent, or maybe they were just too afraid of getting in trouble. But when I went to secondary . . . Scarface, Freak Face, Bride of Frankenstein . . .’

  The commercial production Ivy and I met on was called ‘Little Monsters’ – four commercials featuring kids transformed into various horror staples: vampire, werewolf, zombie and, of course, Frankenstein’s monster. Not for the first time, I wonder how awkward that must have been for her.

  ‘There was one bastard,’ Ivy continues, ‘Aaron Harding. He used to call me Humpty – as in, couldn’t be put back together again. And of all the names, that one stuck the longest. He’d hum the nursery rhyme in class and the other kids
would start laughing. And when I blush, my scars stand out like streaks on bacon . . . no, like . . . sorry, I’m rubbish at similes.’

  ‘At least you know what one is.’ I begin to stand, but Ivy pushes down on my shoulders and continues to manipulate the muscles of my back. ‘We’ll ban it,’ I say.

  ‘What, similes?’

  ‘No, Humpty Dumpty. You numpty.’

  ‘Very poetic.’

  ‘It’s your literary influence,’ I say.

  ‘What, numpty?’

  ‘Sure. As in numptious, numpacity, numpate.’

  ‘I’d quit while you’re ahead, if I were you. So, this was in my third year, and Frank, because of how our birthdays work, he was only one year behind me. And he’s always been a whopper – he was ten pounds something when he was born, God help my poor mum. Anyway, by the second year Frank was playing rugby for the third year first team. Same as horrible Harding.

  ‘Excellent,’ I say. ‘So he smashed him?’

  Ivy laughs. ‘Frank? He’s a softy, he’s never hit anyone in his life. No, it was better than that. He started a rumour that Harding had a tiny penis.’

  ‘And did he?’

  ‘Not according to Frank. But it wasn’t big enough for the rumour not to take, either. Frank started calling him Acorn instead of Aaron, then the rest of the team are calling him Acorn, then everyone in his class and then everyone in school. Funny thing is, by the end of the fourth form no one was calling me Humpty anymore; in fact the whole name-calling thing in general had pretty much stopped. But they called Harding Acorn until the day he left.’

  ‘All thanks to Frank.’

  ‘All thanks to Frank.’

  Ivy’s favourite brother is still in the shower, gargling the chorus to ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’.

  ‘So he’s a softy?’

  ‘As a kitten.’

  ‘Do you reckon I could take him in a fight, then?’

  Ivy laughs so loudly and abruptly that I feel her spit, snot or both splash onto the back of my neck. ‘God, sorry!’ she says. ‘It’s just . . . remember in Tom and Jerry, how the bulldog would slam Tom from side to side like a ragdoll?’