he was making sure that they were not running up huge bills, but Andrew knew it to be one more manifestation of his father’s need to exert control, and the cursor hovered constantly over the box that would shut the page whenever he was perusing Gaia’s details online.
Ruth was still rattling from topic to topic, in a fruitless attempt to make Simon produce more than surly monosyllables.
‘Ooooh,’ she said suddenly. ‘I forgot: I spoke to Shirley today, Simon, about you maybe standing for the Parish Council.’
The words hit Andrew like a punch.
‘You’re standing for the council?’ he blurted.
Simon slowly raised his eyebrows. One of the muscles in his jaw was twitching.
‘Is that a problem?’ he asked, in a voice that throbbed with aggression.
‘No,’ lied Andrew.
You’ve got to be fucking joking. You? Standing for election? Oh fuck, no.
‘It sounds like you’ve got a problem with it,’ said Simon, still staring straight into Andrew’s eyes.
‘No,’ said Andrew again, dropping his gaze to his shepherd’s pie.
‘What’s wrong with me standing for the council?’ Simon continued. He was not about to let it go. He wanted to vent his tension in a cathartic outburst of rage.
‘Nothing’s wrong. I was surprised, that’s all.’
‘Should I have consulted you first?’ said Simon.
‘No.’
‘Oh, thank you,’ said Simon. His lower jaw was protruding, as it often did when he was working up to losing control. ‘Have you found a job yet, you skiving, sponging little shit?’
‘No.’
Simon glared at Andrew, not eating, but holding a cooling forkful of shepherd’s pie in mid-air. Andrew switched his attention back to his food, determined not to offer further provocation. The air pressure within the kitchen seemed to have increased. Paul’s knife rattled against his plate.
‘Shirley says,’ Ruth piped up again, her voice high-pitched, determined to pretend all was well until this became impossible, ‘that it’ll be on the council website, Simon. About how you put your name forward.’
Simon did not respond.
Her last, best attempt thwarted, Ruth fell silent too. She was afraid that she might know what was at the root of Simon’s bad mood. Anxiety gnawed at her; she was a worrier, she always had been; she couldn’t help it. She knew that it drove Simon mad when she begged him for reassurance. She must not say anything.
‘Si?’
‘What?’
‘It’s all right, isn’t it? About the computer?’
She was a dreadful actress. She tried to make her voice casual and calm, but it was brittle and high-pitched.
This was not the first time stolen goods had entered their home. Simon had found a way of fiddling the electricity meter too, and did small jobs on the side, at the printworks, for cash. All of it gave her little pains in the stomach, kept her awake at night; but Simon was contemptuous of people who did not dare take the shortcuts (and part of what she had loved about him, from the beginning, was that this rough and wild boy, who was contemptuous, rude and aggressive to nearly everyone, had taken the trouble to attract her; that he, who was so difficult to please, had selected her, alone, as worthy).
‘What are you talking about?’ Simon asked quietly. The full focus of his attention shifted from Andrew to Ruth, and was expressed by the same unblinking, venomous stare.
‘Well, there won’t be any… any trouble about it, will there?’
Simon was seized with a brutal urge to punish her for intuiting his own fears and for stoking them with her anxiety.
‘Yeah, well, I wasn’t going to say anything,’ he said, speaking slowly, giving himself time to make up a story; ‘but there was a bit of trouble when they were nicked, as it turns out.’ Andrew and Paul paused in their eating and stared. ‘Some security guard got beaten up. I didn’t know anything about it till it was too late. I only hope there’s no comeback.’
Ruth could barely breathe. She could not believe the evenness of his tone, the calmness with which he spoke of violent robbery. This explained his mood when he had come home; this explained everything.
‘That’s why it’s essential nobody mentions we’ve got it,’ said Simon.
He subjected each of them to a fierce glare, to impress the dangers on them by sheer force of personality.
‘We won’t,’ Ruth breathed.
Her rapid imagination was already showing her the police at the door; the computer examined; Simon arrested, wrongly accused of aggravated assault — jailed.
‘Did you hear Dad?’ she said to her sons, in a voice barely louder than a whisper. ‘You mustn’t tell anybody we’ve got a new computer.’
‘It