Chapter 5 #6
No one has anything to say to that. Dinner happens. Just the soft folding of wraps, scoop of spoons in the sauce. Nora gets up, brings the wine to the table. Tops up Robin’s glass, sits back down.
So what’s your – Robin begins, but Nora says sorry, can we just, and Bren pauses with his wrap halfway to his mouth.
Can we just establish, she says, moving her hand in a small circle, that if you’re not willing to be critiqued on the way you live your life, Bren, why is it that you get to criticise your mother’s?
I wasn’t critiquing, Robin says, to Bren. I was just asking.
I wasn’t criticising her, Bren says, and Nora grabs Robin’s wine glass for a drink, her own glass empty except for the foam from her beer.
What did you mean then, she says, and Bren is not sure what she wants him to say; what will make things better, between them.
Because this isn’t about his mother. This is about how she stayed here, and he didn’t.
She is, it seems, so angry with him – when really, he should be angry with her – and she’s using his mother as an excuse to get all self-righteous.
He knows it. She knows it. Robin, who doesn’t know it, is watching them both, his own tortilla stilled in his hands.
I was just saying it’s not so different, doing what I do, Bren says, with his one-shouldered shrug. Making money, holding down a job.
I think you were saying it’s entirely different, actually, Nora says.
Bren lowers his wrap to his plate; it slowly unfolds itself, revealing a mush of peppers and chicken.
It was just an observation, he says.
Nora, Robin says, in a tone that Bren can’t unhear.
Like he understands something Bren does not, when Robin is the one that doesn’t understand all the things between the two of them.
Long summers. Longer winters. Family barbecues cut short, so they could hang out alone, in his games room or on the village green, trading hoodies and jokes and small, unspoken parts of themselves.
And yet Nora responds. Puts his wine glass back down on the table and nods, almost imperceptibly, in Robin’s direction.
The Philippines! Robin says, out of nowhere. You’ve been there too, haven’t you?
Yes, Bren says.
Tell me, Robin says, is it true they’re obsessed with karaoke?
Er, yeah.
And what, Robin says, and this is a very personal question, Bren, for such an early stage in our friendship.
Okay.
What is your karaoke song of choice? You look like a Ricky Martin man, to me. She Bangs.
Nora laughs; Bren doesn’t.
Now don’t be shy, Robin says, and he has perfect white teeth, the sort Bren has seen advertised inside in-flight magazines; the result of Invisalign, surely, or gallingly good genes. I’m right, aren’t I?
Bren would be the last person on earth to sing She Bangs, Nora says.
Bren would be the last person on earth to sing at all, Bren says.
Come on, man. You actually lived in the Philippines and didn’t once partake in their ancient customs?
Karaoke is hardly ancient, Bren says, and Robin says he’s a Purple Rain fan, himself, quite fancies Prince’s white gloves, too, for a special occasion.
Circa 1985, The Brits. For the wedding maybe!
He hadn’t thought of that! And Nora, this dinner is exceptionally good, by the way. As inauthentically Mexican as it is.
Agreed, Bren says, and Nora dips her chin; half in apology, half appeased, Bren thinks. She offers him a third tortilla, which he takes.
The conversation loosens up, from there.
More jokes, fewer questions; they keep eating, talk less about travel and work and home and more about inconsequential things, which are, by Bren’s own admission, more significant.
Nora still sews for fun. Embroiders poetry and names into napkins for christenings, or birthdays, makes a bit of money on Etsy as well as via her own shop, doesn’t charge enough, Robin says, for her talent.
Robin is a photographer (I was close, Bren thinks); specialises in antiques; fusses with grids and snoots and chases a lot of unpaid invoices.
Freelance, though he prefers the term footloose and fancy free.
Favourite city: Paris, or Madrid (Bren’s is Rio).
Never been outside of Europe apart from when they went to Boston for a wedding; they went to New York for the day, Nora cried at the MOMA.
What’s MOMA, Bren asks, and Robin thinks he’s kidding.
And how do they spend their Friday nights?
Bren likes to hike, rock climb, yes, he’s bungee jumped and skydived, too, multiple times, but the water is where he likes to be; forget Full Moon Parties and night clubs and local bars, lazing down a creek under a setting sun is the only real high that he craves, while Nora and Robin are jointly obsessed with animated movies, some of them dark as hell.
Watership Down, The Last Unicorn, The Plague Dogs –
Do not, cries Robin, talk to me about The Plague Dogs!
And things are finally normal, like Bren had hoped it might be.
Old friends, having dinner, although something is still fizzing inside him as he sits across from her, like this.
At her kitchen table as they exchange scraps of each other but are still, he thinks, holding back, somewhat, presumably because Robin is here.
He goes with it, though. As Robin plugs his final wrap with sour cream to soothe the spice, and Nora scatters red chillies inside her own; as Bren does the same, mirroring her movements in a gesture that means nothing, or perhaps, in some buried, awakening part of him, says see, Nora, we shouldn’t hold back.
Because you and I? We can handle the heat.
_
And so he turns it up, without meaning to. In the living room, as Robin makes coffee in the kitchen, after dinner.
The fairy lights have vanished. Furniture pushed back into the centre of the room, the makeshift dance floor long gone. Bren sits in an armchair as Nora settles opposite, on the sofa.
Third time lucky, Bren says, and she pulls a crocheted cushion onto her lap, waiting for him to explain. We’ve not been normal since I got back, have we? he says. At the party, or the pond. I was hoping tonight would be the night.
Nora lifts a stray thread off the cushion cover. Says right. That she wishes. Well.
A habit of hers, not finishing her sentences; one that Bren thought she’d have grown out of, by now.
I don’t want to argue, Bren says. If you’ve got something to say, Nora, can you just say it? So we can get back to normal?
I think, she says, and there’s a crash from the kitchen so that they both flinch, and Robin calls out, sorry, butterfingers! As you were! And they look back at each other, Nora flushing red again, this time, Bren thinks, because she is marrying someone who has – who says – butterfingers.
You think what? Bren prompts.
I think our versions of normal are very different, she says.
Well, obviously, Bren says. Don’t take that the wrong way, he adds, holding his palms up. Just because my mum stays home and sees no one –
She sees people!
She sees you and Freya and the postman, Bren says. But just because that’s her life doesn’t mean I’m judging yours, he says, gesturing around the room. It’s great, for you, what you have going, here. As much as it pains me to say it.
Nora holds his eyes, then. Mesmerising, as ever, one blue, the other a kind of green-brown; there’s a name for it, he knows, a colour he can’t recall. Words gone from his brain, when she looks at him like that.
She looks, but says nothing, so he keeps talking. Tries to explain.
It’s just not what I pictured, for us, he says, glancing at the rug and the bookcase and the pictures on the walls.
Voice level, to show he’s not being accusatory; just nostalgic.
Remember, Nora, how we said we’d not buy things, but acquire stories and sunburn and scars, and I did that, I’m doing that, but look, here, at what’s yours.
Reliving this, though he does not say it out loud.
And he thinks he knows what she’ll say; thinks she’ll ask, what did you picture, then, but instead she says: there was no us once you left, Bren.
There is no clock in here. No ticking between them, no sound.
Just this thing that they’ve danced around for years, which hadn’t seemed to matter when he was thousands of miles away, but here, now, with those eyes on his and the smell of her so close – body lotion, Christmas, clementines – he finds that he wants to know why she didn’t come with him.
Is burning to know, in fact, why she didn’t give him a single reason why not, and yet answered his calls and his emails as if things never needed to be explained, as if he should just get over it, get over her, which he did, didn’t he, he did.
I’ve missed you so much, Nora says next.
Her voice, so quiet.
Sometimes I miss you so much I forget what I’m doing, she says. But I’m also so furious with you, Bren.
There. She’s said it. And it’s what he’d expected, in a way, after how she’d acted at the party and the ponds and over dinner, but it’s also not expected, after twelve years of friendly dispassion.
Something new rises between them now that it’s out there: a joint, moon-like hurt, impossibly big and full.
I don’t think you get to be, Bren tells her.
They keep looking at each other. Are still looking as Robin walks in with a tray declaring that he comes bearing hot drinks, and biscotti – do you like biscotti?
Who doesn’t like biscotti! Handing Bren a coffee, placing Nora’s hot chocolate on the side table.
Dark, it looks, at least eighty-five percent; which will be bitter, Bren knows, as she raises it to her mouth.
Bitter and, he’d have thought, not at all to her taste.
Not the flavour he’d expect her to choose.
_
So, Bren, Robin says, stretching his long legs out on the rug. Please do pepper us with honeymoon ideas.