She looked at him. Her eyes were as dark and round as her Spider-Man child’s. ‘Thank you,’ she said.

He badly wanted to say something back. He opened his mouth and then realised that what he hopelessly wanted to say was whole paragraphs of confused thinking about parenthood and letting go and not being able to and having to. He closed his mouth again and smiled. She looked at him for a moment longer and then bent and lifted the child into the buggy.

‘Bye, Spider-Man,’ Russell said.


He let the front door fall shut behind him with a bang. The hall inside was very quiet and the cat, who had been washing in a small patch of sunlight on the stairs, stopped to look at him.

‘Edie?’

She came slowly out of the kitchen holding a mug.

‘Edie—’

‘Sorry,’ she said. ‘Oh my God, sorry. I didn’t listen to it’. Russell put his bag down. ‘Didn’t listen to what?’

‘Your message. I was fiddling about upstairs and I heard the telephone and I didn’t do anything about it. And then I got deflected. As you do’.

Russell came closer and gave her a brief kiss on the cheek.

‘I didn’t leave you a message. I came home on impulse’. Edie looked suspicious. ‘What impulse?’

‘Uneasiness,’ Russell said. He looked into her mug. ‘Can I have some of that?’

‘It’s green tea,’ Edie said. ‘It is supposed to be invigorating and it’s filthy’.

‘Brown tea, then’.

Edie turned.

‘What are you uneasy about?’

Russell went past her and crossed the kitchen towards the kettle.

‘You know perfectly well’.

‘I am waiting for it to pass,’ Edie said. ‘Like glandular fever’.

‘Ben left a month ago’.

‘What’s a month?’

Russell ran water into the kettle. ‘Quite a long time’.

‘What do you want of me?’ Edie demanded. Russell plugged the kettle into the wall and switched it on.

‘When Ben left, I wanted you to look my way again. Now I would settle for you being able just to rouse yourself, climb out of this – this inertia’.

‘Inertia,’ Edie repeated calmly.

‘Yes’.

‘Like – like not jumping up and down, every time you come home—’

‘No!’ Russell shouted.

‘Then—’

‘Like,’ he said more calmly, ‘not even bothering to listen to your telephone messages’.

He went back past her out of the kitchen to the answer-phone in the hall. Edie drifted to the window and thought, without any urgency, that, if anything, the glass downstairs was even dirtier than the glass upstairs.

‘It was Freddie Cass,’ Russell said, from the doorway.

Edie said, not turning round, ‘I don’t know anyone called Freddie Cass’.

‘Freddie Cass, the director,’ Russell said. His voice was excited. ‘The director of Ghosts’.

Edie turned.

‘He wants you to ring him. He wants you to ring him now’.


Ben had been on an assignment as assistant photographer taking pictures of a major newspaper editor at Canary Wharf. The editor was being photographed for a feature piece in a business magazine that had wanted independent pictures, which was something of a coup for Ben’s boss, and one he had taken very seriously. The editor had been polite but had clearly had a thousand other things on his mind beyond being photographed in such a way as to ensure similar future commissions for Ben’s boss, so the session had had a kind of tension to it, which resulted in Ben’s boss giving Ben a needlessly hard time about every last little thing. As a consequence, Ben had dropped a still-damp Polaroid, mixed up the sequence of some black-and-white film, and held a reflector at an angle which, his boss said, any amateur prat could see bounced light off the ceiling and not the subject. As the subject was still in the room, trying to look simultaneously relaxed and in charge in his double-cuffed shirtsleeves, Ben could not point out that he was only obeying instructions and, if they were wrong, they were hardly his fault.

In the midst of all of this, Ben remembered, in the slow, amazed way he often did remember things, that his brother, Matthew, also worked somewhere in Canary Wharf. He couldn’t remember where or who for, but the idea of Matthew suddenly seemed a most attractive alternative to returning on the Docklands Light Railway with his boss, who would have been stressed out by the photographic session and consequently anxious to take his stress out on somebody else. Ben mumbled that he needed a pee, and went out into the corridor outside the newspaper boardroom, and scrolled to Matthew’s number on his mobile.

‘Wow,’ Matthew said, ‘Ben?’

‘Mmm’.

‘Where are you?’

‘I’m here’. ‘Where?’

‘In your office’.

‘What are you doing here?’

Ben leaned against the nearest wall.

‘Working. Nearly done’.

‘Right—’ ‘You free?’ ‘What, now?’

‘Half an hour or so—’

‘Well, yes. Yes, I could be’.

‘I need a beer,’ Ben said. ‘This afternoon has pretty well done my head in’.

‘Fine. Fine. It – it would be good to see you’. ‘You too, bruv’. ‘Don’t do that’.

‘What?’

‘Don’t,’ Matthew said, ‘use that fake East End talk’.

“Scuse me’.

‘It’s phoney crap—’

‘What’s eating you?’ Ben said.

‘Nothing’.

Ben looked down the corridor. A girl was walking away from him, silhouetted against the light from the window at the end. She was a lovely sight, tall, high heels. Naomi was tall too, nearly as tall as Ben. He suddenly felt rather better.

‘Half an hour,’ Ben said. ‘OK?’

‘Yes,’ Matthew said. His voice had dropped a little. He sounded, abruptly, very tired. ‘See you’.


‘ We can drink in here,’ Matthew said. Ben peered through the glass doors. ‘Looks a bit posh—’

‘It’s all posh round here,’ Matthew said. ‘Artificial and posh’.

He pushed the door open, leaving it to swing in Ben’s face. Ben followed him and seized his arm. ‘What are you like?’

‘What?’

‘What are you in such a strop about?’

Matthew sighed. He looked, Ben thought, not just tired but drained and without that air of confident togetherness that Ben had supposed, for the last five years or so, to be inbuilt. He watched Matthew order, and pay for, a couple of bottles of beer, and then he followed him to a table in a corner, under a plasma television screen showing a picture of some giant freeway interchange, photographed from directly above. Matthew put the beer bottles on the table and glanced up at the screen.

‘I watched the rugby World Cup on that’.

Ben grunted. He put his duffel bag down on the floor and eased himself into an Italian metal chair.

‘How’s things—’

Matthew went on looking at the screen. ‘OK’.

Ben said, ‘My afternoon was shite. He just put me down the whole time over stuff he’d told me to do anyway’.

Matthew glanced away.

‘But apart from this afternoon, everything’s OK?’

‘Aren’t you going to sit down?’

‘Yes’.

‘Well, sit then. I can’t talk to you if you’re standing’.

‘Sorry,’ Matthew said. He sat down slowly, on the chair next to Ben’s. Then he said, ‘Sorry to snap at you’.

Ben took a swallow of beer. He pulled off his knitted hat and ruffled his hair.

‘That’s OK’.

Matthew looked at him.

‘And you really are OK? Apart from this afternoon’. ‘I’m great’. ‘And Naomi—’

‘Great. And the flat. It’s cool. I really like it’. ‘You look as if you do’.

‘Don’t tell Mum,’ Ben said, ‘but I should have gone before, two years ago, three’. Matthew picked up his beer.

‘We all do that’. ‘Do what?’

‘Stay too long’. Ben eyed him.

‘At home?’ ‘And the rest’.

‘Matt,’ Ben said, ‘what’s happened?’ Matthew put the neck of the bottle in his mouth and took it out again. ‘I’m not sure’.

‘You and Ruth—’

‘I think it’s over,’ Matthew said abruptly.

‘Christ’.

‘It just happened. It was so sudden. And I didn’t see it coming’. He took a mouthful of beer and shut his eyes tightly, as if swallowing it was an effort. ‘And I should have’.

‘Hey,’ Ben said. He leaned towards his brother. ‘Hey, Matt. Mate—’

‘She wants to buy a flat,’ Matthew said, ‘and I can’t afford to. I can’t afford to because it’s been costing me every penny I earn to live the way we do and I’m a stupid bloody idiot to have got in this mess. I am twenty-eight years old, Ben, and I’m back where I was at your age. I feel – I feel—’ He stopped and then he said in a furious whisper, ‘Oh, it doesn’t matter’.

Ben said slowly, ‘It’s hard to say—’

Matthew looked at him.

‘It’s hard to say, to a woman, that you haven’t got enough money’.

‘Yes’.

‘And if the woman has more than you do—’ ‘Yes. Does Naomi?’

‘No,’ Ben said, ‘and I tell her I wouldn’t mind if she did. But I’m not so sure’.

‘It isn’t good,’ Matthew said. ‘You may not have failed, but it feels as if you have. So you don’t say, and she makes assumptions. She’s perfectly entitled to make assumptions, if you don’t say’.

Ben drank some more beer.

‘Don’t you want to live in her flat?’

‘Not under those circumstances. I’d feel like a lodger’.

‘So—’

‘So I’ve said to her that if she wants the flat – and she should be buying a flat, earning what she does – she should go ahead and buy it, but that I can’t come with her’.

‘Why,’ Ben said, ‘does it have to be this flat?’

‘She’s set her heart on it—’

‘But if you had a cheaper flat, then you could manage it, maybe’. Matthew frowned.