cheery greeting from an elderly neighbour… But it was not for him: he sucked on a mint and gently punched his sternum and he rounded the corner to face the thin, wedge-shaped terrace. The small, mean parade of shops – the post office, the off-licence, the Pakistani grocer, the shuttered, out-of-business butchers, the estate agent – tapering to the pointed apex, number 36, with its dust-mantled pride of double-parked saloon cars and, on the ground floor, the frosted windows of ‘B and B Mini-cabs and International Couriers’.
Some new fancy plastic name tag had been screwed above the bell-push since his last visit – black copperplate on smoked gold: ‘FAMILY BLOCJ’. ‘The J is silent’ would have been the motto blazoned on the Bloçj family escutcheon, if such a crest could be imagined, or alternatively, ‘There is a dot under the C’. He could hear, coming through time, his father’s patient, deep, accented voice, at innumerable post-office counters, holiday hotel reception desks, car rental franchises: ‘The J is silent and there is a dot under the C. Family Blocj.’ Indeed, how many times had he himself apologetically muttered the same instructions in his life? It did not bear thinking of – it was all behind him now.
He rang the bell, waited, rang again and eventually heard small feet pattering rhythmically down the stairs in irregular anapaests. His little niece, Mercy, opened the door. She was a tiny girl, bespectacled like every female member of his family, who looked about four years old, though in fact she was eight. He worried unceasingly for her, for her diminutiveness, her unfortunate name (short for Mercedes – which he always pronounced the French way, trying to forget that it was because her father, his brother-in-law, was the co-partner in the mini-cab firm) and her dubious destiny. Hugging the door, she stared at him, shy-curious.
‘Hello, Milo,’ she said.
‘Hello, darling.’ She was the only person he ever called ‘darling’, and then only when others were out of earshot. He kissed her twice on each cheek.
‘Have you got anything for me?’
‘Lovely sausages. Pork.’
‘Oh, lovely.’
She stamped up the stairs and Lorimer followed wearily. The air in the flat seemed tart and briny with steam and spices. Apparently a TV, a radio and another source of rock music were playing simultaneously somewhere. Mercedes preceded him into the long triangular front room, filled with light and sound, at the sharp end of the terrace directly above the ‘B and B Mini-cabs and International Couriers’ control room and the bull pen for the drivers. The music (middle-of-the-road country/rock fusion) was playing in here on a dark, winking stack of audio equipment. The radio (shouting advertisement) emanated from the kitchen to his left, accompanied by the clatter and bang of energetic cookery.
‘It’s Milo,’ Mercedes announced and his three sisters looked round lazily, three pairs of eyes dully registering him through three pairs of lenses. Monika was sewing, Komelia was drinking tea and Drava (Mercy’s mother) was eating – astonishingly, given they were ten minutes away from lunch – eating a nut and chocolate bar.
As a child he had parodically burlesqued his three older sisters as, respectively, ‘Bossy’, ‘Silly’ and ‘Sulky’, or alternatively as ‘the big one’, ‘the thin one’ and ‘the short one’, such crude appellations strangely becoming ever more apposite as he and they aged. Being the baby of the family, he was routinely ordered around and importuned by these, to his memory, always-women. Even the youngest and prettiest, sullen, petite Drava, was six years older than him. Only Drava had married, produced Mercedes and then divorced; Monika and Komelia had always lived at home, working intermittently in the family businesses or part-time jobs. They were now full-time carers and, if either or both of them had a love life, it was lived secretly, somewhere far afield.
‘Morning, ladies,’ Lorimer said with feeble jocularity. They were all so much older than him: he saw them more as aunts rather than sisters, reluctant to believe the blood tie was so proximate, trying vainly to establish some genetic distance, some congenital breathing space.
‘Mum, it’s Milo,’ Komelia bawled into the kitchen, but Lorimer was already heading that way, toting his solid bag of meat. His mother’s wide frame blocked the doorway as she wiped her hands on a dishcloth, beaming moistly at him through the fogged lenses of her spectacles.
‘Milomre,’ she sighed, the love in her voice palpable and overwhelming, and she kissed him vigorously four times, the plastic frames of her glasses smiting his cheek-bones