He looks across at his wife. She is watching one of her soaps whilst knitting a cardigan for their second grandchild. Her fingers are a blur in her lap. A rapid succession of tiny, muted clicks. There is a soothing rhythm to it. It is impossible not to be impressed. She doesn’t even need to glance down; her fingers know exactly what they are doing. On the screen, a pretty barmaid is pulling a pint for a taxi driver whilst another jostles for her attention.
Once, just for something to say, he asked her about a character knowing well that she had left the show years ago. She rolled her eyes but smiled indulgently. It was something. ‘Can I talk without you losing concentration?’ For a moment he thinks she hasn’t heard him, but then the knitting slows to a stop and she reaches for the remote to pause the television. ‘Sorry, I didn’t mean for you to pause it.’ He feels stupid now. All he wanted to say was about the landline and now she’s made a big deal out of it. ‘Just thinking, we haven’t had a proper telephone for years. It might be nice to find an old fashioned one and put it out on the hall table.’ ‘What for?’ He can see her trying hard to hide her irritation, but a little snort escapes her before she can help it. ‘Why waste money on that when we all have mobiles?’ He shrugs. ‘I don’t know. Nostalgia I suppose. When I was a kid there was just one phone in the house. There was a pencil and pad in the drawer underneath so you could write down messages. You had to lift and joggle it otherwise it wouldn’t pull out. The runners were warped.’ Now she makes no attempt to hide her disdain. ‘There’s lots I don’t like about modern life, but each of us having our own phone isn’t one of them. The girls can contact us anytime they need to. God, remember call boxes? The smell of them. Filthy, unhygienic things. You had to wipe the earpiece,’ she pantomimes a gag, ‘good riddance.’ ‘I suppose you’re right,’ he says, even though he knows how much this response can annoy her. The white towel comeback, she calls it. Just now though, she is content to have him be quiet so that she can return to her programme. The needle clicks begin again. Knit one, purl one. He watches how her eyes switch from once character to the other as they speak, like she is watching a tennis match. They have a forty-inch screen. It is too large for the sitting room, but she and the girls outvoted him. He likes it for the football. ‘You know, you get maudlin over the strangest things.’ This time she only lowers the volume (from 20 to 16) instead of pausing. ‘Having just one phone was a nightmare. My sisters always hogging it – big strops and slamming doors. Your house must have been the same, surely?’ He knows this is a rhetorical question because she presses the volume back up and focusses again on the screen. He tries to follow the narrative. As far as he can gather, the young barmaid is flirting with the father of her best friend. Before long they will be surreptitiously dating each other. Someone will happen upon them, perhaps hold it over them for a while (it’s hardly the stuff of proper blackmail), then the big reveal, which will reverberate along the households like a stick across a picket fence – culminating in a physical altercation on the cobbled streets. But they’ll stretch it out over the entire summer so that no one on holiday misses out. He has seen several variations of the same scenario over the past decade, but it always comes as a shock to his wife. He takes the bookmark out of his Dean Koontz and sees that he has twenty-seven pages left. If he reads them now he will have nothing to read on the train tomorrow. Then he remembers seeing the baby. ‘Hey, you’ll never guess who I saw on the train yesterday.’ He knows the hazards of interrupting her again, but this one is worth it, an item of genuine interest. ‘Remember Melanie and Frank? We went to their son’s christening.’ ‘What about them?’ She stabs the controls at the TV and the pint glass belonging to the taxi driver freezes an inch from his lips, his leathered elbow jutting out, his Adam’s Apple bulging obscenely. ‘I saw the baby on the train,’ he says, all pleased with himself. ‘I knew it was him because of that purple birthmark everyone pretended not to notice. It’s much smaller now. That’s what happens to those things. It doesn’t actually shrink – it stays exactly the same size; it just looks like it shrinks because the face around it grows.’ ‘Did you speak to him?’ ‘No. He was four seats away and the carriage was jam packed. Anyway, he wouldn’t know who I was. It was definitely him though. Gave me quite a scare I can tell you.’ ‘Why?’ He considers carefully before replying. ‘Well, because I hadn’t thought about him in ages. Actually, that’s not true. I think about him a lot. But I always picture a wee baby in my head. It’s like I’d put him in a pigeonhole where time couldn’t get at him. Then, blow me, there he is – a lad in his late teens with a wee fuzzy beard. He had overalls on. He must have an apprenticeship in the city.
All this time I’ve been doing my thing, he’s been doing his – walking, talking, nursery, primary, secondary. There’s something almost sly about it, don’t you think? Like I’ve just looked away for a minute and he’s grown up to spite me. Gave me such a weird feeling, I had goosebumps and everything.’ ‘Jasper,’ she says. ‘Aye, that’s right. I went through the whole alphabet before I got it. I knew it was something posh like that. I thought maybe Jeremy, but do you remember how up herself Melanie was? A normal posh name like Jeremy would never have done for her. I should’ve remembered that.’ She points the remote back at the television, looks to him, eyebrows raised, then presses play. The taxi driver finally gets to drink his beer, his Adam’s Apple bobbing merrily as he slates his thirst.
‘Can I sit beside you? It hurts my eyes a little at this angle.’ She makes a little irritated meh noise. ‘I thought you were reading your book. I’ve got all my wool and stuff.’
‘It’s fine.’ ‘Are you sure? I’ll move it if you want. Just I’ve got the pattern here as well.’
‘Don’t worry.’ He opens his book again, but the letters are just a blur on his lap. He knows she never checks the pattern. It is only there as a prop, the way a concert violinist has the music on display but has it all in his head.
He feels like asking her, do you really need two spaces to knit?
It is obvious that she just does not want him to sit beside her. The realisation of this makes him feel immeasurably sad. This is their life now.
The girls are all up and out. Soon the other two will follow their elder sister’s example and start their own family. And his wife will knit garments for them all. An endless cascade of brightly coloured fabric meandering down under the watchful gaze of the soap opera characters, whose tawdry little spats are all the drama she seems to need.
He looks closely at her face in profile. She was once pretty – not that he was ever that shallow – but now her face has a jowly, hangdog aspect. It is less obvious when she smiles. She used to smile at the very sight of him, when he came to pick her up in his old Datsun, to take her to the movies. That was over thirty years ago. And there had been smiles and laughter throughout the courtship and long into the marriage. Now, she only seems to smile (properly, with her eyes) when she is with their granddaughter. On screen they have switched scenes from the pub to the garage. A female mechanic (even the old soaps move with the times) is shaking her head under the bonnet of a battered looking van. The grease on her face has been artfully placed to accentuate her prominent cheekbones. He remembers watching this programme in the late 1960s (it was already well established) at the slippered feet of his long dead grandmother. He doesn’t recall her ever knitting, but certainly her sowing paraphernalia (housed in a repurposed Quality Street box, the source of endless disappointment when opened) was being put to good use, darning a production line of socks and stockings. The show was in black and white then, the characters older and calloused, all wearing scarves. Alright, our kid. Tarra chuck. He can still see her rounded knees, the wrinkles of her tights, her poking tongue and squint when she threaded the needle. He thinks again about the baby on the train. Jasper. How was it even possible for him to be there? The tiny thing they had celebrated, all talcumed powdered and swaddled up. It was ridiculous. Despicable even. It had really messed with his equilibrium. But there he was, all grown up, with his whole life ahead of him. Stride forth, little Jasper, explore and conquer the world. He only realises he is weeping when he feels her soft hands on each side of his face, her lips brushing gently against his forehead. ‘What is it, babes, what’s the matter?’
And when he finds himself incapable of answering, all she does is hold him tightly, rocking him the way his mother used to, whispering ith Mckibbin is an English teacher working in Glasgow. He is married with four daughters and two beautiful granddaughters. His favourite short story writers are O.Henry and Raymond Carver. He has been published in both the Bath and Edinburgh short story competitions.soft, soothing words into his ear. ‘There, there, now…shoosh. It’ll all be okay, I promise.’
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