Perfect Day

stopping the image going any further.
    ‘Do you miss your mum?’ Kate asks.
    It’s only what he asked her, but the silence in which he should reciprocate a few details yawns between them.
    He can’t think of his mother as Mum because she despised the word, but he can’t explain that because it will make him sound like a snob. It’s such a simple question, but it panics him because his mother seems to be with him more now she’s dead than when she lived, and his emotions are all tangled up in a mesh he’s trying to clamber through that’s barbed with anger.
    ‘Yes, I do,’ he says, gazing across the lake to the sloping lawn of the American ambassador’s residence, refusing to engage in further probing.
    ‘Did you miss your dad when he left?’ Kate wants to know.
    Alexander brings his focus back to her. This is much easier territory. He has his answers all worked out because he’s had more practice.
    ‘When he left, he told me he was going away for a while, so I assumed that meant he was coming back,’ he says, with a short wry laugh.
    ‘... He took me out for treats every so often, and every time I saw him I got a present, so, no, I didn’t miss him. Then I was about ten and I happened to see him one day on Parliament Hill Fields. He was with his new family and they were flying a kite. He didn’t see me. He looked so happy and free with them, not anxious like he was with me, and I suddenly realized that he wasn’t ever going to come back. Then I missed him a lot, and I told him that I didn’t want to see him any more. It was meant to hurt him, but I think he was probably relieved.’
    A large tear has formed in the lower lid of Kate’s right eye like a glass bead, then the surface tension breaks and it travels in a thin wet line down her face.
    He feels a fraud for adding that last sentence. He has no way of knowing whether his father was relieved or not, but it sounds good and it has always elicited sympathy from women. It occurs to him that this exchange of parental details is like a courtship ritual, a kind of verbal genetic test perhaps, to reveal your background. It normally happens before you mate.
    ‘Hey,’ he leans forward, touches her knee, ‘it was a long time ago.’
    ‘Didn’t you see him again?’
    She’s like a child, wanting a happy ending to a story.
    ‘Yes. I did. Once. When I was at university. I invited him up for Sunday lunch. He came, with a lot of swagger and flashing of credit cards and cringe-making talk about how he used to smoke reefers when he was a student...’
    ‘What’s reefers ?’
    ‘Dope.’
    ‘Cannabis?’
    Kate’s clearly shocked that a parent would do such a thing.
    ‘He took me out to lunch at a very expensive restaurant. We pretended we were having a good time, enjoying each other’s company, saying absolutely nothing to each other of any significance. We argued a bit about politics. He’s a Tory, of course. Then I asked him why he had left my mother, and I suppose he was a bit carried away by the cigars and brandy and general bonhomie. He said, “She’s a marvellous but impossible woman!” and he sort of winked at me, as if I was simply going to agree, now that we had become friends, men together. So I hit him.’
    This is the part of the story where the woman normally gasps or claps, but there’s a sharp intake of breath and he realizes how inappropriate it was to tell Kate that after her description of her father. And it’s not even true. He did feel like hitting him, and somehow the impulse has become an action in the telling. ‘I’ve never hit anyone in my life,’ he stammers. ‘Sounds like he deserved it,’ Kate says, uncertainly. ‘The shameful thing was,’ Alexander’s desperate to inflict some sort of punishment on himself for such a lie, ‘I wasn’t cross with him for sullying my mother’s reputation, or anything noble like that. I was furious with him because it was true, and I was so angry that he left me to cope with her on my own.’
    He’s never admitted that to anyone before. It makes him feel better about defrauding Kate of her sympathy.
    If either of them had the choice, he thinks they would go back to how they were before they got into the boat, both deliberately not asking about each other’s past. Now they have each offered up a little of their suffering, they have allowed reality to slide into the boat with them, bringing all its attendant hypotheses and doubts, irrevocably muddying the clarity of