Broken Rules and Other Stories Read online

  ‘I still think he’s adopted,’ my mother said, holding up a pointless glass ornament filled with layers of swirling coloured sand. I don’t think she was at all aware of what she was holding, although she squinted into it in the way a collector of antiques might.

  ‘I’ve told you what I think. It’s none of our business,’ my father said. He had shoved his hands deep into his pockets, and was dawdling aimlessly around the edges of a table stacked high with gaudily wrapped boxes of toffees and fudge, all ribbons and cellophane and depictions of lurid seaside scenes.

  His response quieted her, briefly, and she considered the ornament, turning and twisting it in her fingers. I tried to picture her chasing me in these gardens. Round the fountain, one way then the other, splashing and laughing. But the image wouldn’t come. It was impossible to imagine my mother high or carefree or reckless in blue jeans.

  #

  The next night, the Americans didn’t appear at dinner and my mother kept going on about how they would miss it altogether if they didn’t hurry.

  ‘Maybe they’ve gone out to eat,’ my father said, gnawing at the stubborn meat on the bone of a lamb chop. ‘Don’t you sometimes feel like trying something different?’

  ‘But they’ve paid for dinner here,’ said my mother, being an all-inclusive type.

  My father dropped the bone onto his plate and it made a hollow clatter.

  Dessert arrived. I was having ice-cream with chopped nuts and chocolate syrup. My parents had asked for the cheese board. On this trip my father had developed a liking for an unusual Danish cheese striated with blue veins, and now he was arranging some of this onto a cream cracker. My mother glowered as if he were enjoying the cheese out of a desire to be contrary.

  Just then, the American family burst into the dining room. The son wasn’t with them. It was just short of eight o’clock, and by this time the dinner performance was usually over.

  My mother picked up the salt cellar, inclined it towards the ceiling lights, and gazed into it, rolling it round in her fingers as if seeking a fortune inside the grains.

  ‘Are we too late?’ the mother crooned to Dave.

  ‘Of course not!’ said Dave unconvincingly, wringing his hands and shooting an anxious glance along the corridor into the kitchen. My mother had said that the chef liked a drink, and I wondered if this had something to do with Dave’s uncertainty. He guided them to their usual table.

  Without moving her head my mother slid her sleeve up her wrist to consult her watch. She glanced at my father, her left eyebrow raised. She clearly wouldn’t have shown the family the same grace.

  ‘Terrific,’ said the mother. ‘We had a slight delay at the beach.’

  ‘Oh,’ said Dave, looking pained and somehow responsible for events at the beach. ‘I do hope everything’s alright,’ he said, terribly proper and English all of a sudden.

  The woman became more American in response. ‘Nothing to worry about,’ she said brightly. ‘Teenagers. You know how it is.’

  Dave didn’t pursue it, and I wondered if he did know how it was, or if he might ask Rose about it later that night. He pulled out the mother’s chair. The boy’s chair remained disappointingly empty. I’d almost finished my ice-cream and the cheese board looked done with, so shortly we’d be off for our nightly walk and then I wouldn’t see him again until breakfast. We were nearing the end of our holidays, and I still believed that he and I were destined to come together in some way, even if only to share a milkshake. This pre-destiny would have to unfold soon, otherwise I’d be going back up north on the train and he’d be flying home to Boston and we’d never see each other again.

  Dave rushed around to the daughter’s chair, but she sat down too quickly for him to pull it out for her. He shook out her napkin from the table and draped it over her lap, adjusting it with care. She said something from between her teeth.

  I eyed the girl intently, trying to join her dots. I pictured her cruising the streets of Boston in her boyfriend’s big red car. Driving with one hand on the wheel, the other on the gearstick, the boyfriend suggests they stop at Misty’s for burgers and soda, ‘and you can tell me all about your vacation in England.’ She rolls her big cow eyes and tells him that the holidays were boring, and England’s so dull. Dull, dull, dull. She blows a huge bubble of pink gum then pops it with a perfectly painted hot-pink fingernail, then says she’d much rather hear what he’s been up to over the summer. And then as I realised that I too would rather hear what he’s been up to over the summer, the images from Boston dissolved to leave just the girl glaring at me. I tried to offer an uncertain smile, but she was having none of it.

  ‘I’ll bring you the soup,’ said Dave to the mother. ‘Will your son be joining us?’

  ‘He’s getting changed,’ she said, glancing at her husband again.

  ‘Oh,’ said Dave. He eyed the wall clock, which had edged beyond the sacred hour of eight. He went back to the kitchen.

  The American woman said, ‘Soup again,’ in a distracted voice to no one in particular as she moved her cutlery into a more satisfying arrangement.

  ‘I hope everything is okay,’ my mother said. She was looking from beneath those formidable eyebrows, still holding on to the salt cellar.

  The woman, caught masterfully off guard, said, ‘Graham made some new friends down at the beach. He lost track of the time. We had to hurry to get back.’ She looked at her husband, and I briefly thought that he might be the Graham she talked of.

  ‘Oh?’ said my mother.

  ‘He went off for a while, that’s all. It’s not like him. We were concerned. Apparently I should learn to let go.’ She looked at her husband again.

  Realisation set in, and I felt a pang of disappointment that her son had been making new friends at the beach, when all the time I’d been on the same beach, available and only too willing to hang out with him.

  ‘Here comes Graham now,’ said the woman. ‘Unfortunately he didn’t have time to shower before dinner.’ Her voice trailed off, and she looked down at the splayed fingers of her hand as though checking the nails were clean.

  The American boy entered the dining room. Graham: what a wonderful name! My mind was flooded with a striking image of him taking the shower he didn’t have time for. Concerned at where this might take me, and knowing I would soon have to stand up and leave the dining room, I tried to banish the thought by watching my father chase errant crumbs of cheese and cracker with his fingertip.

  ‘Yes,’ said my mother, drawing out the word as though everything had been explained. She watched Graham as he pulled out his chair. I wondered if she also had in her head an image of him standing beneath jets of water, soap suds running down his bare chest and long slim legs.

  All this adult attention, had I been its recipient, would have made me blush. I examined Graham’s face, grateful that he was the centre of activity, that it was okay for me to stare. Permission to gaze is a wonderful thing. Sparse whiskers were straggling at the edges of his cheeks. His hair, tangled and matted with salt and sand, stuck out at the back and sides. It all seemed so carefree and bronzed and Californian.

  When he was seated, his mother said it was good of him to join them.

  ‘Honey,’ said the father sharply. Then he whispered a softer ‘honey’, but the echo of the first stayed in the air. He said something quietly about boys and wild oats. He was looking at my father, which seemed odd, but nobody reacted.

  At the mention of wild oats, Graham caught my eye. I wanted to smile, to rescue things for him, to demonstrate an allegiance, but I felt stung and sore and it wouldn’t come. He hesitated, just a brief pause, a hiccup in his insouciance, then he turned away and looked down, and I noticed then that he actually was blushing.

  #

  That night after dinner, the American parents were in the bar, as well as my parents and a loose collection of background guests I’ve largely forgotten about. The American teenagers had gone elsewhere, to places I could only imagine. Their parents were seated on stools at the bar, the way Americans sit in the movies. We were at our usual table near the door. I couldn’t picture my mother up on a bar stool. I don’t think she’d have known where to put her handbag.

  The Americans were talking to Dave while he stocked the fridge with bottles.

  ‘I won’t be coming back next year,’ said my mother.

  ‘We’re not the only guests,’ said my father. ‘It’s just his way of getting to know them. It’s their first time. He’s putting them at ease.’ He palpated his tie knot, and centred it just so, and then, satisfied, sipped from his glass of beer.

  ‘Ease, my foot,’ she said.

  Dave held up a bottle of wine, displaying the label. The woman read it. Dave made some comment, then she laughed loudly, head back like a seal catching fish. Her husband’s shoulders remained steady and square, and he had the guarded air of a stranger who happened to be sitting next to her.

  I said that I wanted to go upstairs to read. My father handed over the room key. ‘I’ll bring you a drink later, and a snack, if you’re still awake,’ he said.

  So off I went, with a vague idea to have one of my rambling night-time adventures. But I didn’t go outside this time. Instead, sure that the adventure resided within the hotel, I started to walk upstairs. I arrived at the first floor, and Graham came running up the stairs behind me. I said a weak hi as he passed, and at first I thought I’d been too quiet for him to hear, but then he turned round and smiled, and something in the middle of my chest dropped out of my body. He unlocked and went into a room on that floor. Number 12. He left a trace of the cool evening in his wake. After he’d closed the door behind him, it held some element of him, resounded with clues upon and beyond its plain white surface.

  I stood on the landing for some time. The light, tinged green from the carpets, had an underwater quality, and there was a reassuring smell of laundered linen and cakes of perfumed toilet soap. It was conceivable that if I was still and quiet, no one would ever come by and nothing would happen for the remainder of my life. I could cheat the rules of space and time and prevent the world from moving forward. As a watched kettle never boils, or a courted phone never rings, so a watched door will not open, a watched staircase produces no movement. It was a beautiful suspension, with Graham’s nearness to me fixed for eternity.

  But I broke the spell. I took a tentative step towards room 12. If I knocked on the door, if Graham were to answer, I’d say, what? What could I say? The answer would, I was certain, come to me. I’d be rescued by fate. I had nothing to lose and everything to lose. The holiday was almost over. I drew a fortifying breath, readying myself for the anxious unknown, but. But. My heart was fluttery. I felt far away, a faint impression, removed from myself and the scene.

  I heard a noise behind me from the stairs, like fabric swishing through air, so I moved away from the door, retreating silently into a shady recess near the top of the stairs. The American woman passed by in a perfume of alcohol and fresh cigarette smoke.

  She stood outside room 12 and straightened her skirt then knocked on the door. Nothing happened at first, but she was patient and didn’t bother knocking again. Eventually the door opened. She said something. A radio’s faint music came from inside the room. Then Graham stepped forward, appearing in the doorway. He was shirtless, and a white guest towel was secured tight around his hips so low as to reveal the line of the top of his pubic hair. There were drops of water on his chest. His hair was black with wetness and slicked away from his face.

  His mother was talking, but I couldn’t make out what was being said. He looked alternately from her face to the carpet at his feet. He kept fiddling with a tendril of his damp hair, playing it away as it tumbled over his face. As he lifted his arm to do this, there was a flash of dark hair in his armpit. Bushy, manly, raw and exciting, a public display of his body’s changes. I wondered when, if ever, hair would begin to grow under my arms.

  She reached out, as if she were about to take his hand. But instead, she put two fingers inside the top of the towel and pulled him towards her. She kissed him, on the cheek, near to his ear, the way I’d seen her do in the dining room. They came apart, then kissed again. He stepped back into the doorway, and said something. He looked down. She placed her hand onto his upper arm and he looked up. He said something that sounded like ‘soldiers’, then she nodded then walked away, and he closed the door.

  She saw me standing there, but didn’t speak or register any surprise. She bumped into the banister and went down the stairs, back to the bar, into the activity.

  It was now just me and Graham on opposite sides of a closed door. Watching all of this had loosened something inside me. My mother had a concern, often voiced to her friends, to neighbours, teachers, to anyone prepared to listen, that I wasn’t a mixer, that I didn’t take part in things and had no interest in socialising with other children my age. She talked it up into a problem. She was right in her categorisation but wrong in her attitude. I had chosen to be that way. I had limited interest in the company of other children. But I recognised that here was a chance to put that right, to make an effort, to get myself out there and reach towards a boy of my age, or near to my age. Hands across the water, a friendship for life. Perhaps.

  I walked up to his door. Tell me about America, I thought. That’s all I had to say. Tell me about Boston. I want to hear all about the streets of your city. Its smells, sounds, its people. Your friends, tell me what they look like. Tell me all about your friends, and what you talk of with them, and describe the things you think of when you turn the lights out at night.

  And so, with this in mind, I tapped on the door, three times, almost as if I didn’t want anyone to answer, but each knock was slightly louder than the last. Because in truth I did want someone to answer, even though I knew that the easiest, the least challenging outcome would have been for no one to respond.

  There was no answer, so I tried again, three knocks, slightly louder this time. In the middle of the door was a tiny peephole like a bubble, and I fancied that he might be looking through it, spying the distortion of my face, trying to figure it out and thinking that perhaps whoever it was had come to the wrong room.

  My enquiry wasn’t answered. I counted down from ten while I was standing there, believing he might come to the door before I got to one. Then I counted down again, slowly, slowly, certain that something had to happen after a countdown. Something must happen. Life depended on events occurring. I considered knocking again. Just one more time. I think about it sometimes, and I wonder what might have been had I tried that third time.

  GRAY

  Afterwards, I dressed quickly while he watched from the bed. Then I examined the framed photographs he’d placed on the nightstand earlier. To help me out, he’d said as he arranged them. Black-and-white images of him from a more youthful time. In some he was alone; in others with friends, boyfriends; androgynous groups at the beach, in backyards.

  I picked up one of the pictures: a solitary figure, firm and brimming, on a seawall, a bare knee drawn up to his chin. Brilliantined hair, cut in a similar style to mine. ‘You?’ I said, inclining the frame towards him. He nodded. ‘Handsome,’ I said. ‘Who took the picture?’ He shook his head, said he didn’t remember, that it was probably a friend.

  He got out of the bed and dressed with slow care into a light grey suit. The suit was much too big for him. It did him no favours, and put years on him. It gave him the lonely look of one who’s lost all sense of self-awareness, and who no longer has reliable friends to provide kind advice against wearing pale grey suits. On closer inspection, and I felt this was okay to do, I noticed that the suit, like him, was frayed in parts, and had tidemarks of greasy grime at the inner cuffs and on the top of the collar. But it had possibly, based on the photographic evidence, been a good fit at one time.

  As I fingered the fabric he watched patiently, and this felt more intimate than anything that had happened in the bed. I felt solicitude for the frame rattling inside the garment, and I didn’t want to leave the old man just yet.

  He said he was going for his walk to the park, and I followed him, down in the elevator, then by his side, and he didn’t seem to find this unusual. As we walked he told me he was accustomed to taking coffee in the park every morning, unless the weather was wet or cold.

  We wandered among the early morning activity of shops and cafes preparing for the day ahead. A delivery driver was unloading boxes from the back of a van. He looked at the old man and smiled at me. When we’d passed the van, the old man said, ‘He thought you were my son.’

  I peered sideways. His expression was serious. Grandson more like, I thought.

  ‘Sometimes,’ he said, ‘I come out for a walk even if it’s raining, as long as it’s not too cold. I’ve never really minded the rain.’

  We stopped at the gates to the park. He told me we’d arrived. I had no bookings for the rest of that day, so I suggested I might come in and sit with him a while.

  He hesitated. ‘I can’t pay you for this,’ he said under his breath, as if someone might be around to hear. ‘What’s left has to last me for the rest of the week.’

  I told him no, no, it was okay, I just wanted to spend some time in the park.

  He led the way through the gates and across the unkempt grass to a stone and wooden bench beneath a spreading tree. It was a peaceful setting, mossy and secluded. No one else in the park, apart from us and the birds. I asked him about the tree, what type it was. He shook his head. He had no idea. I was surprised he didn’t know.

  After a while, ‘About now,’ he said, ‘would normally be the time for my coffee.’

  I told him I’d get coffee for both of us.

  ‘I wasn’t suggesting …’ he said, making moves to find his wallet. I touched his hand, stopped his search, refused his money.