Shooting in the Dark

happened?’ he asked. ‘What’s the matter?’
    ‘It’s Ralph,’ she said. ‘I can’t feed Echo down there while he’s trying to cop a look all the time. It’s impossible.’
    ‘Look at what?’
    ‘Jesus, Geordie, my tits. What d’you think he’s looking at? Sitting there eating everybody’s dinner and watching me feed Echo with his mouth open, drooling tomato juice.’
    ‘I’ll get some more sausages. I already said that.’
    ‘Why should you get them? Why can’t he get them?’
    ‘He’s lost his job. I don’t know if he’s got any money.’
    ‘So we have to keep him as well?’
    ‘You think he was ogling you, Janet?’
    ‘I’m telling you. He’s a sleaze. When I’m feeding Echo I want to be natural and relaxed. That’s the only way it works. If I get tense the milk doesn’t flow, you know that. If it carries on like this, I’ll dry up and we’ll have to start bottle feeding.’
    ‘I’ll talk to Ralph,’ Geordie said. ‘See if I can sort it out.’
     
    Ralph was in the sitting room in front of the television. He was sitting on the base of his spine with his legs spread out in front of him. Geordie told him what Janet had said. ‘I was watching her, yes,’ he said. ‘But it wasn’t ogling, there wasn’t any sex in it. Jesus, Geordie, she’s my brother’s wife. What d’you take me for?’
    ‘It upsets her if you watch her like that.’
    ‘Yeah, OK, that’s cool. I can understand that. I was watching Echo, really, seeing how she was feeding, but I won’t do it. I’ll look the other way.’
    Geordie went to the shop for the sausages. If you have to believe your wife or your brother, who d’you believe? No contest, he said to himself, you believe Janet. On the other hand you don’t want to call your brother a liar, get him all pissed off as well. And you specially don’t want to do that if you’ve been separated from your brother for most of your life, been dreaming about meeting up with him again. When you’ve finally got him back and there’s so much stuff to catch up on, the last thing you want is for him to disappear again. Get on a ship and sail away.
    He got the sausages but instead of taking them home he went round to Sam’s house, see if the great man’s brain could come up with a solution. ‘All I know,’ Sam said, ‘it’s almost impossible to live in a family when someone else comes in from outside. It happens sometimes, can work real nice, but usually it’s a disaster.’
    ‘Thanks a heap.’
    ‘I’m just telling you what I think. What d’you think?’
    ‘Dunno.’
    ‘What does that mean?’
    ‘It means I don’t know what’ll happen. Ralph could be here for ever, or he could disappear again. I doubt he’ll go away, but that’s all I can say about it. The only reality is doubt. Who said that? That the only thing you need never doubt is doubt itself? You can worry about God and your family, your friends, whether the world’s round, if you’re gonna get cancer and die before you’re thirty. All those things are up for grabs, but doubt is a constant; you need never doubt it. Who was it? Who said it?’
    ‘Must’ve been a philosopher,’ said Sam. ‘Descartes? Sound anything like him?’
    ‘Day cart? Leave it out, Sam.’
     

17
     
    Janet felt like one of those figures in a Lowry landscape. Pushing Echo’s pram into the wind, her slim body at a forty-degree angle, she didn’t know where she was going. Geordie was out playing detectives with Sam. His brother Ralph had been watching her ever since Geordie left the house.
    When he’d begun his surveillance of her, and his innuendo, the day after his arrival in the house, Janet had laughed and told him to go away. But his answer had been to step up the action into a higher gear. ‘Man needs woman,’ he’d said this morning. ‘It’s as simple as that. Like the poet said, man needs woman.’
    He eyed the line of her rump, the outline of her breasts, and edged up closer as she bent to stuff Echo’s clothes into the washing machine.
    She closed the door of the washing machine, put Echo in the pram and left the house. She went back for a coat and slammed the front door so hard the glass in the top panel shattered into hard rain.
    After Echo’s birth, when they’d been discharged from the hospital, Janet had thought everything in her life would settle down to normality at last. With Geordie and Echo she’d found the family that had always been missing, and the kind of togetherness