Free The Other Son by Nick Alexander Page B

She rolls to the right and looks at the strip of moonlight shining through a gap in the curtains. It must be a full moon. That’s why she can’t sleep. That will be why the cats are fighting as well. A doctor once told her that the psychiatric wards all fill up on full-moon nights, that the hospitals even lay on extra staff. It’s an actual fact, one of those commonly accepted facts of life that everybody knows to be true, but that no one can explain, that science will perhaps never explain.
    She rolls to the other side and looks at Ken’s shiny head. She sighs and then snorts gently in surprise at the fact that it’s there again – that thought, that forbidden idea. She’s thinking about leaving him again, actually playing the scene on the cinema screen in her head: Alice packing a suitcase, Alice walking away; Alice buying pans for her own little flat somewhere, perhaps in the same building as Dot, Ken sitting alone at the kitchen table, eating a sandwich, reading and re-reading her goodbye note. She wonders if he’d cry. She reckons that he wouldn’t.
    It’s all madness, though. The full moon has turned her into a lunatic. And isn’t the French word for ‘moon’ where the ‘lune’ in lunatic comes from, after all?
    Where would she live? What would she live on? She doesn’t even have her own bank account. And if it’s taken Dot three years to sort it all out... well... she’s almost seventy already.
    She’s not going to sleep now, she can tell. Those familiar insomnia sensations are with her – she’s thirsty, and hungry. She’s achey and fidgety. She moves towards the edge of the bed, then gently eases herself to sitting position. She doesn’t want to wake Ken up and have to share the early hours with him complaining about his lack of sleep. She really doesn’t want that. She listens to the ticking of the clock for a moment, then pulls her dressing gown on and sneaks from the room. To avoid the creaking floorboard on the landing, she edges along the wall like a cowboy in a shoot-out.
    Downstairs, she makes herself a cup of tea and a slice of toast. She sits and stares out at the garden. It looks alien and unfamiliar in the moonlight, like some photograph by a modern artist, like, perhaps, a dream scene. It’s almost like daytime out there except that the colours are all wrong.
    She’s still thinking about packing a suitcase. It’s more of a feeling than a thought, really – a compulsion almost. Ideas that come at nighttime are always more forceful, more obsessive, more seemingly clear-cut than the complicated real-life world of daylight. She knows this from experience.
    She needs some task to distract her until daybreak. She needs something to keep her busy until the gravity of reality yanks her back to earth. She scans the room. Perhaps she’ll clean the oven. Ken will call her mad if he catches her. He’ll call her a lunatic, in fact. But she’s been meaning to do it for ages and that cake had a distinct smell of roast chicken about it. She crosses the room and pulls the oven cleaner and the rubber gloves from beneath the sink.
    Yes, she’ll clean the oven, and then maybe she’ll defrost the fridge. And then, perhaps, just perhaps, she’ll pack a suitcase. She laughs at the absurdity of the idea. As she pulls on her rubber gloves she imagines Dot sleeping in her own bed in her own little flat and feels a fresh pang of jealousy.
     
    ***
    “I said I wasn’t going to come here anymore,” Dot says, looking up at the Starbucks sign.
    Alice, who already has one hand on the door, says, “Oh, don’t be silly. It’s just for a quick coffee.” She pushes into the cafe and Dot reluctantly follows.
    Once they have joined the queue, Alice asks, “Why, anyway? What’s wrong with here?”
    “I saw a thing on the telly,” Dot says. “They don’t pay their taxes, apparently.”
    “I don’t think any of them pay their taxes,” Alice says.
    “No one rich seems to, that’s for sure,” Dot