a woman,’ Margaret said, surprising Rebecca again by stroking her cheek. ‘Ben, give your son and his partner a kiss. You’re standing there like a dummy – just like your father did when he first saw me seven months pregnant.’
‘Of course… Congratulations,’ said Ben shuffling forward happily from his spot looking out the front window. ‘Fantastic! Surprising. Inconceivable, almost, I suppose.’
A kiss on the lips for the couple, and he stood there nodding and smiling, trying to think of something more to add. ‘Drinks! I should get everyone drinks. Wine OK for everyone? It’s not a bad one, for an Ecuadorean.’
‘Just a water for me please,’ smiled Rebecca.
‘Of course, of course,’ said Ben, patting Rebecca on the arm as he headed for the kitchen. James looked at her with a raised eyebrow and shake of the head as his dad went out.
‘So it will be a natural birth? At your home?’ Margaret asked.
‘Well we haven’t thought that far ahe—’
‘Yes Mother, of course we’re going to be doing things naturally,’ interrupted James. ‘We’re not the Beckhams.’
‘The who?’
James muttered something to himself under his breath that even Rebecca standing next to him couldn’t quite pick up.
‘An association footballer of some renown and his wife, a former singer of popular youth dance tunes, your honour. Widely reputed to be too posh to push,’ he told his mother.
‘I know who the Beckhams are, James, I couldn’t catch it because my hearing’s down because I was next to a police loud hailer for three hours when we were kettled last week. The boys at the youth project talk about him all the time,’ Margaret said. ‘The body art seems to be the most interesting thing about him. His wife seems to be a principal cause of eating disorders for a generation so I don’t think she’d have the strength to survive a natural delivery. Now let’s go and find Ben in the kitchen. The Mongolian stew should be about ready, we saw it being prepared in this fascinating documentary on the collapse of Chinese-Soviet ideology, you really should see it…’
Stepping out into the garden after lunch, James saw his dad, loitering between a broken toilet cistern and a rusted, wheel-less bicycle and smoking a cigarette. When James had been growing up his parents had both smoked like French philosophy students. Margaret had always been passionate in her defence of smokers’ rights and against their stigmatisation, which she attributed to drugs companies and governments collaborating to create a culture of fear which they used to bolster their power and make money. Then about ten years ago she quit after a health scare, and the evidence on passive smoking suddenly became quite compelling. Any doubts became cheap diversionary tactics of Big Tobacco, and James’s dad now had to smoke in the garden. Fortunately the carcinogens in smoke were only conclusively proven to be present in tobacco fumes, and so Margaret didn’t have to join Ben outside when they were connecting to global folk traditions with a dope digestif after their dinner.
‘Well here he is. The traditional family man.’
‘Dad.’
‘I think we know each other well enough now, please, call me Ben.’
It was the same introductory chat they’d been having since James had got married.
‘So you’re joining the brotherhood of fatherhood,’ said Ben.
‘Yep, I guess so.’
‘Or is brethren better?’ Ben asked himself distractedly. ‘Maybe the point gets lost. Brotherhood of fatherdom maybe, if you don’t mind a neologism…’
The two men looked out over the erratically lined mud of the backyard vegetable patch, some shrivelled and frostbitten squash remains just about visible among the patches of dead weeds that were Ben and Margaret’s main crop. Sitting on a pile of old paving slabs Ben used the top of the toilet to roll another cigarette.
‘You don’t think you’re a bit young to settle down?’ Ben asked.
‘Older than you were.’
‘No, I was thirty by the time you were born.’
‘Dad, I’m thirty-two in June.’
‘Thirty-two? Really? I suppose that makes sense.’
Ben’s tongue flicked out daintily dabbing the edge of the cigarette paper. James turned away and kicked a pebble into a fence covered in ivy and repressed a little shake. The accompanying tiny wet clicking sound Ben made and physical resemblance to a tiny lizard always gave him the heebie-jeebies.
‘No, you’ll be fine,’ Ben continued, ‘you do learn to work around the restrictions, and they get fascinating as they get older. Got these open minds that you can really teach if you don’t fill them with gogglebox crap.’
‘I’m sure it’ll be interesting and rewarding for me eventually,’ said James.
Seeing the sarcasm had been missed by Ben, as usual, he decided he might as well change the subject to what he’d really come out to the garden for.
‘So how’s work?’ he asked.
Ben shook his head. ‘Advertising is down again, and I’m losing more editorial control. I try and fight, but these owners hold job cuts over my head. I won’t give up but they wield a lot of influence these media conglomerates.’
You’d think he was working for News International, not the local rag, thought James. He regarded his dad’s job as presenting a constant threat of self-righteous, dull diatribes about the freedom of the press and power of local communities, but at least it saw his father get animated about something. Ben’s work on the newspaper had also caused in-law tension for years, since both dads discovered they’d crossed swords before when Howard had been fairly senior in the borough council covered by the paper.
A few years before Rebecca and James had met, Howard had been Something Secretary or Deputy Chairman of the local Conservative Party, and the Tories had complained about media bias from the then politics editor, Ben (who was also the paper’s deputy editor, communities editor, and just-about-everything editor, apart from sport). This had caused an earlier storm over advertising and editorial independence, and seen a change in the scope and tone of the local politics reporting to something ‘more upbeat and positive’. It had emerged amid the volleys between both sides that many of the local advertisers were ‘coincidentally’ concerned that the paper was becoming too radical, and had threatened to pull all their advertising, which would effectively shut the Harrow Focus down. The Harrow Focus, thankfully for Ben, didn’t close down. The Harrow Focus was still going strong, or limping along depending on how you saw it, and still covered all the local news for Harrow and the district.
All the news.
‘And how’s the skyscraping temple of Mammon?’ asked Ben.
‘Good, good. I managed to reduce thousands of people to a number on a spreadsheet last week, so should be due a promotion. Listen, you still have that crime desk column?’
‘For what it is,’ sighed Ben. ‘It could be a powerful vehicle for tackling injustice, a spotlight on persecution, but apparently that doesn’t sell ad space to local plumbers, so it’s all about drug addicts robbing the elderly. What people want to read, it seems.’
‘Sex and scandal, that kind of thing, huh?’
‘Exploitation of poverty-induced misery, and prurient snooping into the lives of others. But I’ve managed to expand the arts section, and we’re making progress in covering more cultural events. Thanks to sponsorship from the local diversity-killing multinational supermarket ironically enough.’
‘Still, subvert from within eh?’ said James. ‘And the crime column. I’d been thinking about it the other day, just generally really, is it still picking up, say, the goings-on at the train station’s gents? Just, y’know, for example.’