Page 39 of Someone Else's Shoes
‘Iknow.’
‘Well, push harder.’
‘You push, if you’re so good at it.’
‘I’ll make the tea,’ says Sam, and picks her way across the living room to the kitchen.
For years she had been comforted by the ordered chaos of her parents’ kitchen, with its pinboards of Greenpeace stickers, its curling photographs of their younger days. Jars and spices jostled for space on the worktops where they had been pulled out and simply left. These days she notes the slackening standards of hygiene, spongy apples and day-old yoghurts on the side. Each one is like a tolling bell, warning her of further responsibilities in days to come. They won’t contemplate a cleaner: it goes against their socialist beliefs. But they have no problem with Sam taking time out twice a week to come and clean up after them. She pulls on her mother’s rubber gloves and starts piling dirty crockery in the sink, listening vaguely to her parents bicker about briquettes.
I’ve pushed this one umpteen times. I don’t know where all the water is coming from.
‘You didn’t fill the kettle all the way up, did you? It’s not ecological.’ Her mother walks in, wiping her hands on her jeans. She is wearing a raspberry-coloured jumper with a grey one over the top. Both have holes in the elbows through which Sam can see two small discs of pale skin.
‘No, Mum. I measured out three mugs.’
‘We’ve only managed two briquettes since lunchtime. How we’ll keep warm on this I have no idea. Honestly. The shed is so full of old newspaper I keep telling your father it’s a fire hazard.’
The irony is clearly lost on her. Sam washes up while her mother makes the tea and lifts the lids of various tins, letting out little ohs of disappointment when the expected cakes or biscuits fail to manifest themselves. From the other roomthey can hear occasional grunts or curses from Sam’s father as he attempts to compress the papier-mâché bricks.
‘How’s Phil?’
NeverHow are you?Sam thinks resentfully, and smothers the thought. It’s good that her parents care about Phil. Lots of people dislike their sons-in-law. She should be grateful.
‘Um … much the same. Bit tired.’
‘Has he got another job yet?’
‘No, Mum. I’d tell you.’
‘I called the other night. Did Cat say?’
‘No. I’ve barely seen her.’
‘Always working, that girl. She’ll go far. Anyway, I wanted to tell you about a television show we were watching. I can’t remember what it was now. What was it called …? It was on the television. Oh, yes, she said you’d gone outdrinking.’
Sam takes a long, careful sip of her tea. ‘I had a drink with my work colleagues to celebrate bringing in some deals. It was nothing.’
‘Well, I’m not sure it’s a good idea leaving Phil on his own if he’s down in the dumps. I never leave your dad to go drinking at the pub. I’m not sure he’d like that very much.’
You never went to work, Sam wants to say. You never had to earn money just so that your family could keep a roof over its head. You never had to deal with a boss whose every laboured sigh tells you he thinks you’re a waste of space. You never lie next to the back of a sleeping man wondering if you’ve actually become invisible.
‘Well,’ she says carefully, ‘it doesn’t happen very often.’
Her mother sits down at the table and sighs. ‘It’s very hard for a man, you know, losing his job. He doesn’t feel like a man any more.’
‘That’s not very egalitarian of you, Mother. I thought you believed both sexes should be treated equally.’
‘Well, it’s just common sense. They get – what’s the word? –emasculated. If you’re earning all the money and then going out to the pub in the evening, how’s poor old Phil meant to feel?’
‘Are you telling me you never go out without Dad?’
‘Only to my book group. And that’s only because Lina Gupta always wants to talk about her haemorrhoids and that kind of talk makes him go a bit funny. Honestly, how she can shoehorn a reference to Anusol into a discussion aboutAnna KareninaI don’t know.’
Sam and her mother chat for a while – or Merryn chats and Sam adopts her well-worn role as tame audience for her mother’s concerns about the planet, annoyance at the politicians who are variously self-serving, idiotic or just plain irritating, her neighbours’ woes (who is dying, suffering some terrible ailment, or already dead). Sam had observed some years previously that her mother was uninterested in the minutiae of Sam’s own life beyond how it might affect her or Phil, whom she considers the finest of sons-in-law (‘You’reverylucky to have him’). Also, while they profess endless public love for each other, her mother and father use every available opportunity to offload on her separately about the maddening qualities, difficulties and frailties of the other. (‘Hecannotread a road map any more. He says he can, but then he goes completely the wrong way’; ‘She leaves her glasses everywhere. And then she accuses me of taking them! She’s so blind she can’t see where she’s put them.’)
‘So what are you going to do about Phil?’ her mother says, as Sam puts her coat on to leave. She has cleaned the kitchen and the upstairs bathroom, faintly saddened by the sheer number of unpronounceable pills and other medication her parents now seem to require just to function.
‘What do you mean?’
