Broken Rules and Other Stories Read online

  I told him months ago that the same men keep recurring on the chat sites. Same faces or bodies or decor. Then, it was just a passing observation. Now he asks me how it can be like that. ‘If there really are so many online,’ he says, ‘why the same ones over and over again?’

  He’s right. It’s mysterious. Over ten thousand people online most nights, it says, but sometimes I see the fat old guy from Malta with the tiny cock and the grotesque horse ornaments and floral wallpaper ten times or more in the space of an hour.

  Fournier has begun to conjure shadowy figures that creep through my nightscape. He says his wireless connection has slowed. Something’s there, he says, but it’s not declaring itself. There are oddities in the patterns. He’s learned the patterns, he says. That’s all he’s got time for these days – telly and computer. Sedentary pursuits. Since his knee. He straightens his leg and rubs it.

  I look up, and wonder about a white blob in the sky. A planet or star, maybe, but it’s so big and bright. It doesn’t appear to move, but it’s difficult to tell.

  Fournier reads my mind. ‘Satellite,’ he says. Clicks his tongue and pats my leg with a callused hand, and heaves himself up. ‘See you tomorrow night,’ he says. He goes back round the fence. ‘Unless the heat breaks,’ he adds.

  Fournier’s full of shit, mostly. I’m pretty sure of it. But still, I weigh up the modem, blinking at me from its corner of the living room. It seems, briefly, that it could be a conduit between this house and that white blob in the sky. An enormous bank of electronic panels opens up in my mind, staffed by uniformed men and women. Reams of metadata are spewing out for interpretation by the computers. They’re waiting for us to slip up. But what’s the offence? I don’t believe anyone knows for sure anymore. I slam my computer lid shut, masturbate quickly, clean up and then fall asleep. I dream of satellites that look like planets, and planets that look like satellites, and the whole galaxy careens and conflates, and I wake jangling and rattling, glazed in a cool sheen that smells of salty dread.

  THE AMERICANS

  To my mother they were simply the Americans. At breakfast, in the bright optimism of the Avenham dining room, she would say, in her low singsong voice, buttering toast, head cocked to the side, not looking at anyone in particular, ‘Here come the Americans.’ It was said in a way that suggested we might consider making some adjustments to our behaviour. Her expression would morph into carefully studied nonchalance. This would prompt me to sit up straighter in my chair, while my father, in his usual unflappable manner, didn’t react at all.

  My parents and I were always downstairs in the dining room before the Americans arrived. But I had a wish that one day we might arrive at the same time as the other family so we could have longer in their company and be more at leisure to absorb their American ways. I enjoyed observing them: the way they handled their cutlery, how they chewed their food, how they spoke to one another. They’d still be breakfasting as we were leaving to go back to our rooms to gather our belongings for a day at the beach. There was always the opportunity of dinner, but coming near the end of the day this event held less potential for a hatching of shared plans. I felt that if we were to spend more time together in the early bacon-and-eggs atmosphere, there would be a chance for the parents to suggest getting together at the beach later on for milkshakes and meringues and games of cricket.

  They were a family of four, each of them fascinating to me in their own right. But it was the boy who especially captured my interest. He was unlike any of the boys I knew back at home. Almost as tall as his father, he moved through space with a steady athletic grace as if he were moving through water. I’d never visited his country, a place of sky-scraping buildings and grand monstrous bridges and graffiti-plastered alleyways and subway trains I knew only from the late-night police dramas on the television. It was as if this boy had jumped straight out of the streets of San Francisco or New York into the quaint seaside lanes of the south coast of England.

  He had a look of not caring much for anything. His sister appeared to possess a similar outlook. They shared a peculiar facial expression, like grazing cows with no particular reach in life beyond the perimeter of their paddock. Nothing caused them to smile or betray any flickers of curiosity. I hardly ever noticed the girl looking at me. At times I wondered if she were even aware of my existence.

  The morning the American family walked into the dining room for the first time, the air inside the guesthouse was shifted. Even before I’d heard any of them speak, I could see they had an otherness about them. They smelled of different laundry products, for one thing. They moved in an alien way. Confident, expansive, territorial.

  Dave, the man who ran the Avenham with his wife, greeted the family and showed them to the table next to ours. He made a showy fuss of pulling out the daughter’s chair and shaking out her napkin and placing it across her knees. She accepted his attention without a hint of acknowledgement.

  ‘Good morning,’ my mother trilled to the American woman.

  ‘Good morning,’ said the other mother, smiling like none of my mother’s friends at home ever smiled. The woman spoke the way a character in a television show might speak. I doubt my mother knew straight away that the woman was American. She would have just detected a hint of something foreign. A not-one-of-us aspect to the woman.

  I was in two minds about their close proximity. On the one hand, I wanted the family near to us so I could observe them freely and without any obstructions; but I also knew that having them so close would inevitably consume my energies, and distract me to exhaustion. And it opened up the possibility I might be embarrassed at some inopportune disclosure from my mother, about my lack of interest in sports, or my solitary nature, or my liking for quiet gentle pursuits. My feeble thirteen-year-old physique was always up for scrutiny, and I didn’t want to be compared unfavourably to the alarming robust health of the American boy.

  My mother didn’t like the American woman. I could tell from the way her face twitched; invisible to untrained eyes, but to me and my father it was as clear as if she’d declared her feelings to everybody in the dining room. My mother developed quick instinctive opinions about people, and once formed they rarely changed, even in the light of overwhelming new evidence to the contrary. Other people occupied her thoughts more than anything else. Though she deplored this trait in others, she was what might have been called a busybody. Nosey. I used to dread the idea that I might inherit this unhealthy obsession. While all around us people were busily going about their daily lives, my mother was busily observing them. It never occurred to me then that my own family might have been material for somebody else’s gossip, or that my mother would one day magically emerge to me as someone I would like to have the opportunity of meeting again.

  My father was fastidiously deconstructing a boiled egg, and he raised his eyes to mine, and I knew he was thinking the same thing. We both knew that my mother thought this other woman too much with her loud smiles and her unrestrained arrival into the dining room, and the way she did this with her hair, and that with her jewellery. It would all become explicit later that morning, when we were away from the guesthouse.

  Rarely did anyone come up to my mother’s standards. People were too forward, or too reticent. Too mousy, or too showy. Too familiar, or too stand-offish. And the clincher, when nothing else was available to her, was that they were just too much. At this my father would say nothing, sometimes looking to me as if I might have an appropriate rejoinder. We both quietly knew it was my mother who was too much. But we’d never have dared to voice this, not even to each other.

  Now at breakfast my father was chiming in with a cheery good morning. Then the other father came in too, so that all the adults were greeting like bells in a tower over the scraping of chairs and clattering of hard smiles.

  I watched the American boy carefully throughout the exchange: he didn’t look once at any of the adults. At one point he nudged his sister and then described a shape or a symbol on the tablecloth with h
is index finger. As she watched his hand, he looked sideways at her, and something passed over their faces; not a smile, more an effort not to smile.

  The boy caught my gaze, and I couldn’t quite read his expression. I hadn’t seen it before on anybody else’s face, and so wasn’t able to interpret it. I still find it hard to recall the look at will, but I’ve seen it since. It was a knowing look, as if he were aware of what I was after even though I didn’t yet know it myself. His look filled me with a mysterious tingling hope.

  When the family’s breakfast was well underway, he stood and went to the juice table. It was a rickety thing with a white cloth covering, two plain glass jugs of apple and orange juice, and a tray of overturned glasses. He helped himself to the orange juice, and drank more than half the glass while he was standing there. He topped up his glass, and put the jug, now almost empty, back onto the table.

  He stood at the table, sipping, hand upon his hip. The chalky seaside landscape that hung over the table had caught his eye, and he took in the cliffs, the sea, the amateurish attempts to capture the dramatic play of light and colours and fix an impression of them onto the canvas. The banality of that painting was familiar to me, and I wondered what he saw in it. I looked closely. He was slim, but not skinny like me. His hair and skin were the colours of a baked cheesecake. His jeans were faded to cornflower blue, and snug, despite his slim frame. I imagined all that his jeans were pretending to hide. But more than this. I wanted to ask him about his jeans. I wanted to know where such jeans could be found. Had he chosen them himself? I wanted to find out what he felt and thought about when he chose to wear them.

  His hairstyle was a long way from my short and neat schoolboy crop. My hair was nothing special and didn’t invite attention. Except once in a public toilet from a man who asked if I would like to borrow his comb when he saw me drying my hands through my hair; I told him no, in keeping with advice from my father. My hair was dull, but the American boy’s hair cascaded lustrously to his shoulders. He had a habit of moving it away from his eyes with his fingertips, sweeping it back and then down to the sides, behind his ears. He was doing this now as I watched him, and I realised he was looking at himself in the glass of the picture. I wondered why he didn’t just get his hair cut, as it appeared to cause him so much trouble. I would pluck up the courage and ask him about this too, I decided. Here was a person I wanted to befriend. An opportunity was bound to present itself. Maybe we would find the chance to go and have an ice-cream or a milkshake together, just the two of us.

  Dave came out from the kitchen, smiling at the assembled guests. He noticed the almost empty juice jug and picked it up and looked at it as if he’d never seen it before. Then he took it away, back into the kitchen, and it didn’t return to the table that morning as far as I knew.

  #

  Over the next few days, it was the mystery of the boy’s voice that came to interest me more than anything else. I couldn’t imagine him speaking. I wanted to experience his sound, his American accent, to watch his lips form coherent words and utterances. The thought of talking directly with him gave me butterflies, but still I wanted to hear him, to know what he had to say. I longed to spend time in his company.

  But he occupied a very quiet space. It was frustrating. At some point he would have to say something, anything, if only to communicate what he wanted for breakfast or for pudding after dinner. But he didn’t. Or I didn’t hear him.

  One morning, his mother brushed a strand of hair from his temple and asked him if he would like some eggs. He nodded and made a noise, like an affirmation, and then he looked up to see me staring at him. I didn’t care that he saw me looking because it was the only piece of action taking place, so I had every reason to be watching. And so I felt the creep of bravery. We stared at each other, but he had added strength from the presence of his mother, so that my courage left me and I couldn’t hold it any longer, and I had to look away.

  Whenever his mouth moved in speech, his mother leaned in to him and put her head near to his lips to catch his utterances. Occasionally she hugged him close and long and placed a tender kiss onto his cheek, and a part of her lips brushed his. I looked at my own mother to see if she’d noticed this. I didn’t want her getting any ideas. But she was buttering a slice of toast. She was always buttering a slice of toast. Her body was inclined faintly towards the other table, so attuned was she to the activities there. Even though she seemed otherwise absorbed, she wasn’t missing a thing. I had an idea that she might be using the wide butter knife as a mirror, watching everything reflected on its shiny metal surface.

  The boy looked older than me. This was confirmed one morning in our room when my mother remarked to my father that the American boy was well developed for his age. I was tallish, but very skinny. Lanky, gangly, awkward, whereas he was built like a young man. ‘He’s only fourteen,’ she said to my father. Then she turned to appraise me with a pout. ‘He’d make two of you,’ she said down her nose, frowning, and I felt a sharp draining rush of failure, but also sheer embarrassment at this attention drawn to my physicality and its impending changes. A lot can happen to a teenager in a year: who knew what I’d look like when I got to his age. But I didn’t want to discuss any of this; I preferred to keep my body and its development firmly outside the realms of family discussion.

  Although it never became clear why they were holidaying in Bournemouth, we came to learn a number of facts about the American family. My mother had a technique for garnering information. From titbits overheard at the dining table, she could construct complete histories. Nothing got past her. She could have worked effectively in the intelligence services.

  It turned out the family was from Boston. Boston! The very name was so American. I found it utterly incomprehensible that a family from Boston should want to take its annual holidays in Bournemouth. Surely Boston was a holiday destination in itself.

  ‘Where is Boston, exactly?’ I asked my father one morning. We were waiting in the lobby for my mother to come down from getting ready in the bedroom. We’d just seen the Americans leave the dining room and make their fragrant way upstairs. Dave’s wife, Rose, was at the front desk, arranging pamphlets on local attractions into a plastic display case.

  ‘East coast,’ my father said, low and muttered in a way that told me he wasn’t quite sure.

  ‘Why are they here?’ I said.

  ‘They’re on vacation,’ he said, in a corny American accent. Then he looked around him. ‘On vacation,’ he said again, in a higher voice, this time without the accent.

  ‘But why here?’ I said.

  ‘Why not?’ he said. ‘Bournemouth is as good as anywhere. Don’t you like it here?’

  I did like Bournemouth in many ways, and each year I looked forward with great eagerness to our fortnight away. In fact, I spent an inordinate amount of time thinking about the holidays during the rest of the year. But Bournemouth wasn’t Boston. It was no America. And I would have been mortally disappointed to learn that it lay at the limits of life’s adventures. I didn’t want to hurt his feelings, though, so I just said yes, and then when he appeared satisfied, I added, ‘But it’s a strange place for Americans to visit.’

  ‘A strange place for Americans?’ he said.

  ‘For a family like that,’ I said, and I hoped he would understand what I meant because I wasn’t really sure myself.

  He looked at me as if I had said something awkward or difficult, and then, just when he appeared to be about to offer an observation, he glanced over my shoulder. ‘Here comes your mother,’ he said, and so I turned, and there she was, floating down the stairs as though she were entering an imperial ballroom.

  #

  We were in the town centre taking advantage of the late-night shopping, searching for holiday souvenirs to take back to family, friends, colleagues of my father, the neighbours at home. My mother had a scrupulously compiled list of gift recipients. My father suggested that once the shopping was finished we might round off the evening with a tw
ilit stroll through the botanic gardens before the gates were locked for the night. Our holiday was beginning to draw to a close, the yearly fortnight away soon to be reduced to diminishing tan lines and a folder of smiling photos.

  During our stroll, I spied the American family ahead of us. This was the first time I’d seen them away from the guesthouse, and I was pleased to know they occupied themselves with similar things to us in the evenings. They were milling around near a fountain festooned with garlands of multicoloured lights. I had no doubt my mother’s sensors had alerted her to this development. We slowed our pace, behaving as a unit, taking the lead from my mother’s stealth. She wouldn’t want to catch up to the family, and I was sure she would prefer to avoid any interactions at all in these public surroundings.

  Suddenly the American boy put his hand in the fountain and splashed his sister with a precisely directed scoop of water. She yelped then shouted something, and the two of them started running around like a couple of small children. My mother had stopped us at a kiosk to look at souvenirs and sweets and postcards while all of this was going on nearby. I took up a clever position at a dusty wire rack displaying the usual postcards of the town and beach and nearby attractions shown by day and night. I was able to watch the boy closely as he ran about. I enjoyed this glimpse of him engaged in physical activity. I occasionally lifted and fingered a postcard to add to the impression of absorption in the images, though I could have been holding a photograph of a Parisian street scene for all I knew or cared. I tried to capture the shape of his voice as he called out to his sister. But the sounds were distorted by distance and air, and the rush and gurgle of water from the fountain.

  The mother joined in with the horseplay, chasing her teenagers round the fountain. But the daughter slowed and then stopped and dropped out of the game, so that it was just the boy and his mother running round and round. He chased the mother one way, then they swapped so the chaser became the hunted. The father and the girl stood next to each other, looking as though they had given up.