He won’t tell her that he saw Seb today. He won’t tell her that Seb is coming home.
nora, 2
Her mind is coming together. It’s not that long ago that if her mum put her hands over her face and said peekaboo, Nora did not know where she had gone, and if she would ever come back.
‘Oh, she’s shy, isn’t she?’ they say.
‘She really doesn’t leave your side,’ they say.
‘Oh, bless, she’s hiding,’ they say.
‘Come out,’ they say. ‘We won’t hurt you.’
How does Nora know? Even Auntie Cee and Uncle Augie she’s unsure of, and they at least look like her mother. The woman called Nanny didn’t last a day. Why would Nora want anyone other than her mum?
Then there was the nursery. Nora didn’t know what nursery was. At the settling-in session, it had seemed like any other room. When her mother had left her for that first half-day, she’d panicked, clawed at the window, cried so hard she couldn’t breathe.
No more nursery. No more Nanny.
What to do with Nora?
Everyone says this. Her mum’s sister and her mum’s friend Maisie and, once, after bedtime, her mum. Because her mumhas to work, whatever that is, and her mum has to take Nora with her. And then everyone wants a piece of Nora’s mum, and Nora just wants her mum to herself. So Nora cries, and all the people stare.
They say that Nora’s mum looks tired. That she looks sad, that the lack of sleep is taking its toll, that she’s working herself to the bone. Nora’s mum forgets things, loses things, breaks things, is ill all the time because Nora is always eating things off the floor, forever leaving a trail of snot wherever she goes.
I knew I couldn’t have it all, her mum had said to Maisie, and she’d been smiling, but she was smiling through tears.
Nora knows that tears are sad. She gives her mum a toy, because she wants her to be happy. What will make her mum happy?
the guy with the van
Summer is over. Gone are the days of tropical house, of sparklers in bottles at Ibiza beach clubs, of pills dissolving on tongues at day festivals. Instead, just this: a dismal spray of never-ending September rain. Summer is over, and Smudge is still just Smudge. Benjamin, to his mother. The guy with the van, if you’re in a bind. Ben Morris Surfacing, if you’re in on the joke. Sometimes, he wonders if that’s all he is: the butt of something, every mention of his name needing a comedy addendum. No one can remember where Smudge’s nickname came from, and this in itself seems appropriate. As the years have passed, Ben has been blurred out, lost somewhere along the way.
Smudge pulls his van into the pick-up zone of East Midlands airport, turns off the engine, leaves the radio on. They’ve stopped the music because the Queen has died, so he sits for a while listening to presenters talk in sombre tones. Then he turns off the radio and sits in silence. The rain is a fine and constant mist, and Smudge doesn’t spot Seb until he’s opening the door.
‘Long time, no see,’ Seb says.
It has been. The last time Smudge saw Seb was four yearsago, when he helped him move his stuff out of the flat he’d shared with Clara. The band had got themselves back together for the day, each wanting to help in their own manner. Ryan, with his neat haircut and his neatly trimmed moustache, sticking labels on boxes and making plans for the best way of loading up a vehicle that they once used to fill with their instruments. Nimesh, running his fingers through his long hair as he observed the last thing left on the wall, a hand-drawn illustration of a young man and his dog sitting beneath a statue.
‘Leave it,’ Seb had said. And so they’d left.
Seb isn’t online. Smudge hasn’t seen a picture of him in all the time he’s been gone. He’s shaved his head, his close-cropped hair still dark against his skull. His beard is longer, fuller. Lines are worn into his deeply tanned skin, the tattoos on the backs of his hands blurred by the sun. His eyes crease as he takes Smudge in, seeming to process the time gone by.
‘Fuck, man,’ Smudge says. ‘You look old.’
They laugh, and they throw Seb’s big leather bags in the back, and Smudge worries that, by contrast, he has stayed exactly the same. They used to be tight, he and Seb. They used to smoke together, and Smudge remembers a red-eyed Seb talking about the transcendental experience of being in a mosh pit, of allowing fists and elbows to hit you in the face and force you to feel something. Smudge knows the feeling, of not wanting to feel. He’s thirty-eight years old, and yet he still spends his weeks working on people’s driveways until his back seizes and his hands are scuffed bloody, his weekends shuffling until his ankles hurt, dropping bombs of mandy until he’s ten miles high. He’s too old for this shit, but he doesn’t know whatelse to do. They set off from the airport, sitting in those same seats in which they used to recreate the air drums from the music video to Arctic Monkeys’ ‘R U Mine’, and they talk like no time has passed at all.
‘How long are you back for?’ Smudge asks.
‘Six months or so,’ Seb replies. ‘Get my affairs in order.’
Smudge indicates as they approach an exit. He doesn’t ask what affairs, in what order. ‘And then?’
Seb stares out of the window. ‘And then…’ He trails off.
As the city forms around them, they pass a few of the pubs they used to play at. One of them has been rebranded, sold to a chain. The other has been turned into flats.
‘I don’t think I realised how much I loved all that,’ Smudge says.
