Free Shtum by Jem Lester Page B

Satmap.’
    ‘SatNav.’
    ‘That is what I said.’ He slips his reading glasses from his blue blazer pocket – for Dad, any car outing requires dressing up – and leans close, poking the screen with his finger. ‘This is my road. How does it know this is my road?’
    The SatNav pipes up: ‘Proceed along this road for three hundred yards and take the next left.’
    ‘He’s Australian? The one in the box. How does he know our roads?’
    ‘It’s a computer-generated voice, Dad – there’s a whole selection of languages and accents.’
    He seems impressed. ‘So how much is a thing like this?’
    ‘Fancy one now? You only go to Maurice’s, Waitrose and Florsheim’s kosher deli.’
    ‘Just interested.’

    We enter the M25 and merge into a traffic jam. I glance back at Jonah – he’s finished his apple and is taking the feather to pieces. The plan is to keep him in food and twiddlies for the whole journey and pray his own internal SatNav doesn’t object to the computer version. The outcome is never pretty.
    ‘So, where’s Mum these days?’ I ask.
    ‘You don’t know?’
    ‘How should I know?’
    ‘I just assumed you speak to her, occasionally.’
    ‘Not for a couple of years. Had a postcard from the Maldives.’
    ‘Always such a boaster, Myra. No, your Uncle Matthew told me in his monthly duty call that she is currently living in Norway or Sweden, or some other part of the frozen north. The weather should suit her there, nice and cold.’
    I laugh. ‘Seriously, though?’
    ‘She always had a thing for herring, maybe that’s it,’ Dad says.
    ‘Is she with anyone?’
    ‘What is this? Twenty rhetorical questions?’
    ‘No, just wondered.’
    The traffic is starting to spread like a drawn-out concertina, which brings bouncing and laughter from the back seat. Dad reaches back and hands him another apple, then puts his hands behind his head and shuts his eyes.
    Do I miss my mother? I think about her, not sure that’s the same as missing. I was very young when she left and, as my father never tires of telling me, self-obsessed, irresponsible and an embarrassment.
    What happened? We’ve only ever had a single conversation about it and – as ever – he was evasive, fending off my pointed questions like a fly swatter. Did he drive her out? ‘I would have happily driven her wherever she wanted to go and dumped her there – but I did not drive her out.’ That’s what he said. But, apart from this, everything I know is supposition – the result of voyeurism and stealth.
    My father is fourteen years my mother’s senior. They met, she told me once, through her brother – another Maccabi footballer – and she fell for his no-nonsense manner and his stoicism. There was passion at the beginning, but I remember many nights as a child with her lying next to me, crying into my shoulder. It wasn’t long before she was railing against his lack of emotion. Most of their life together was an endless ceasefire.
    As I recall, we were poor, then we weren’t poor. She wanted, he gave. She wanted more, he gave more. Then she wanted private schooling for me and he put his foot down – it went against everything he believed in, and I never got to choose.
    I once confronted him about the unfairness of living according to his ideals, having no choices myself, and his answer:
    ‘Well, let’s see. You have two eyes, two ears, a nose – definitely a mouth, and that –’ he poked my head hard with his forefinger ‘– that gives you all the choices you need.
    ‘You’ve managed to do enough damage yourself. You are the laziest bastard God ever put breath into and you want for nothing. Tell me you were ever hungry or cold and I will cry crocodile tears for you and find you the number for the Samaritans.’
    I look across at him and he looks back.
    ‘What?’
    ‘Are you happy, Dad?’
    My question is a simple one and yet I sense his answer will be obliquely delivered – in his own image.
    ‘I don’t like being