Free The Other Son by Nick Alexander

she had remembered Ken’s appointment. She wouldn’t have lingered so long in bed had she known that he was out.
    She makes a mug of coffee and then phones Dot. “I was just going to call you,” Dot tells her. “Can you take me to Ikea? I need plates and pans and things.”
    “Ooh, yes!” Alice says. She finds the idea of a trip to Ikea quite exciting. “I could do with some new pans too.”
     
    Not only is finding the entrance to the Ikea car park difficult, but the store itself would appear to have been designed to be as hellish as it can be, from the labyrinthine car park to their careering caddie to the one-way racecourse for aggressive caddie pushers they find themselves on. The entire store has been laid out so that it’s impossible to visit any one department without visiting every other part, so, like sheep, they follow the stream of other shoppers around the loop.
    But despite Ikea’s apparent worst intentions, shopping with Dot for furnishings feels youthful and fun. They argue good-naturedly about whether orange faux-fur cushions look modern or simply “tacky.” They bitch like an old couple about whether it’s best to buy the cheapest saucepans, or, as Alice believes, the ones “designed to last”. They slump in a big red sofa together and both agree that it’s too “squidgy” and that it would be terrible for their ageing backs. And by the time they have negotiated the checkout queues, found the car and unloaded the shopping from Alice’s jam-packed Micra, it’s almost one o’clock.
    “I’ll put the rest away later,” Dot says, chucking two cushions from the top of a blue Ikea bag onto her sofa.
    The sun is streaming into her apartment and the new cushions contribute to making the place look bright and optimistic. “I was wrong about the cushions,” Alice admits. “They look nice. Not tacky at all.”
    “You see.”
    Despite Alice’s protestations that she needs to get home, Dot makes them sandwiches to eat. They slump onto the sofa, sigh simultaneously and then laugh because of it. “I feel like I’ve done one of those army assault courses,” Dot says.
    “Yes,” Alice agrees. “Me too.”
    “I did buy a lot of rubbish I don’t need,” Dot admits, glancing at the pile of bags by the door. “That’s the trouble with Ikea.”
    Alice laughs. It’s exactly what she kept telling Dot every time she added some new impulse purchase to the caddie. She closes her eyes and feels the warmth of the sun on her skin. It’s a funny little thing, but she always dreamed of having a sofa in the sun where she could sit and read her books. You wouldn’t think that it was a complicated ambition, but it was an important one, and it’s something they never quite managed. The windows and sofas, the east-west lie of the houses they lived in, they all conspired to make her sunny sofa a permanent impossibility.
    “Still, what the hell,” Dot says. “You only live once, huh?”
    “Are you going to be all right for money?” Alice asks. She can’t quite get her brain around Dot’s new found independence.
    “I squirrelled away about five grand,” Dot says. “So I’ll be all-right for a bit. Plus the pension should be sorted out soon. I’m seeing some pension chap tomorrow to get them all separated out and everything. Then Martin’s will go to him, and mine to me. That’s the theory, anyway.”
    “Squirrelled away, how?” Alice asks.
    “I’m sorry?”
    “How did you manage to syphon off five grand without him noticing? You were always saying how mean he was.”
    “Oh!” Dot laughs. “That...”
    “Yes, that.”
    “Cash-back, love.”
    “Cash back?”
    “Every time I did the weekly shop, I added twenty or thirty quid cash-back. It shows up on the statements as a single purchase so he never spotted it. Been doing it for years. I put all the cash in my Nationwide account.”
    “And he never noticed?”
    “Let’s just say I complained a lot. About the cost of living, like.”