Pulse

supermarket to buy dinner. He described standing there in a sort of daze, not knowing what he wanted – or rather, wanting everything he looked at. He wandered around, buying all sorts of stuff, came home in a state of exhaustion, and had to take a nap.
    ‘So you see, it obviously works.’
    ‘You mean, you smelt your dinner?’
    ‘No, it’s early days – that’s only my first treatment. I mean, it clearly has some effect. Both physical and mental.’
    I thought to myself: feeling tired and buying food you don’t need, that sounds like a cure?
    ‘What do you think, Mum?’
    ‘I’m all for him trying something different if he wants to.’ She reached across the table and patted his arm, near where his mysterious new pulses lay hidden. I needn’t have asked – they would have discussed things beforehand and come to a joint conclusion. And as I well knew by now, divide and rule was never successful with my parents.
    ‘If it works, I might try it for my knee,’ she added.
    ‘What’s wrong with your knee, Mum?’
    ‘Oh, I sort of twisted it. I tripped and bashed it on the stairs. I’m getting a bit trippy in my old age.’
    My mother was fifty-eight. She was wide-hipped, with a good, low centre of gravity, and never wore silly shoes.
    ‘You mean, you’ve done this before?’
    ‘It’s nothing. Just age. Comes to us all.’
    Janice once said that you can never really tell about parents. I asked what she meant. She replied that by the time you were able to understand them, it was too late anyway. You could never find out what they were like before they met, when they met, before you were conceived, afterwards, when you were a small child …
    ‘Children often understand a lot,’ I said. ‘Instinctively.’
    ‘They understand what parents let them understand.’
    ‘I don’t agree.’
    ‘So be it. The point remains. By the time you think you’re capable of understanding your parents, most of the important things in their lives have already happened. They are who they are. Or rather, they are who they’ve decided to be – with you, when you’re around.’
    ‘I don’t agree.’ I couldn’t imagine my parents, once they closed the door, turning into other people.
    ‘How often do you think of your father as a reformed alcoholic?’
    ‘Never. That’s not how I think of him. I’m his son, not a social worker.’
    ‘Precisely. So you want him to be Just a Dad. No one’s just a dad, just a mum. It doesn’t work like that. There’s probably some secret in your mother’s life you’ve never suspected.’
    ‘You’d be laughed out of court,’ I said.
    She looked at me. ‘I think that what happens with most couples over time is that they find a way of being with one another that is basically untruthful. It’s like the relationship depends on mutually assured self-deception. That’s its default setting.’
    ‘Well I still don’t agree.’ What I thought was: crap. Mutually assured self-deception – that doesn’t sound like you. It’s some phrase you picked up from that magazine you work for. Or from some bloke you wouldn’t mind fucking. But all I said was,
    ‘Are you calling my parents hypocrites?’
    ‘I’m talking generally. Why do you always take things personally?’
    ‘Then I don’t understand what you’re saying. And if I do, then I can’t think why you want to be married to me, or anybody else.’
    ‘So be it.’
    That was another thing. I was beginning to dislike her use of that phrase.
    Dad admitted that he hadn’t expected acupuncture to hurt as much as it did.
    ‘Do you tell her?’
    ‘Certainly. I say, “ Ow .”’
    If Mrs Rose stuck a needle in and didn’t get the reaction she expected, she’d do it again, near the original spot, until she got what she was looking for.
    ‘And what’s that?’
    ‘It’s a sort of magnetic pull, an energy surge. And you can always tell because that’s when it hurts most.’
    ‘And then?’
    ‘And then she does it in other places. The backs of the hands, the ankles. That’s even more painful – where there isn’t much flesh.’
    ‘Right.’
    ‘But in between she needs to see how your energy levels are coming along, so she’s always checking your pulses.’
    At which point I lost it. ‘Oh, for Christ’s sake, Dad. There’s only one pulse, you know that. By definition. It’s the pulse of the heart, the pulse of the blood.’
    My father didn’t reply, just cleared his throat slightly and looked at my mother. We