He doesn’t like the way the friend looks at him. The way she looks at him reminds him of his mother, who he should have forgotten all about but he hasn’t. She was ugly too, bitten by a dog when she was a girl and yapping about it ever since, her mouth scarred, lip twisted like she was sneering at you, which she usually was.
Scarred inside and out, always yelling, at him or at his dad, wanted him to be miserable, just like her, couldn’t stand it whenever he was laughing or playing or happy.
Now look. He’s thinking about his mother again. Why is she always in his head? It’s the other one’s fault, isn’t it, the ugly one in the back, she’s made him think of his mother, he thinks of her when he’s doing things, all sorts of things, driving his car, trying to sleep, watching TV, when he’s with girls and that’s the worst, makes him feel all hollow inside, like he’s not got enough blood to fill him up. Makes it so he can’t do anything. Can’t see anything, except for red.
FOURTEEN
Irene was very worried about Laura. In her kitchen, gently heating a saucepan of baked beans to pour over her toast （Carla would not approve）， she thought about phoning her up, to make sure she was all right. She’d said she was （“Golden! You know I am!”）， but she seemed distracted and anxious. Of course, she’d just lost her job, so she was bound to be worried, wasn’t she? But it seemed like more than that. Today, Laura had seemed uneasy in Irene’s company in a way Irene had never noticed before.
Not that she’d known her very long. Just a couple of months they had been in each other’s lives, and yet Irene had quickly come to care for the girl. There was something so terribly raw about her, so unguarded, Irene feared for her. Someone like that seemed so vulnerable to the worst the world had to offer. And it was on this vulnerable young woman that Irene had come to rely, because without Angela, Irene found herself alone. She was aware, of course, that there was a danger in allowing herself to see Laura somehow as a replacement for Angela.
They were, in their way, quite similar: both funny, kind, visibly fragile. The best thing about them, from Irene’s point of view, was that they didn’t make assumptions. Laura didn’t just assume Irene would be incapable of learning how to use a new app on her mobile phone; Angela didn’t assume Irene would have no interest in the words of Sally Rooney. Neither of them assumed that Irene wouldn’t laugh at a dirty joke （she would if it were funny）。 They didn’t take for granted that she would be physically incapable, or small-minded, or uninterested in the world. They did not see her, as Carla did, as a busybody, an old fool.
Irene was eighty years old, but she didn’t feel eighty. Not just because she was, sprained ankle notwithstanding, a spritely, trim woman, but because it was impossible to feel eighty. Nobody felt eighty. When Irene considered it, she thought that she probably felt somewhere around thirty-five. Forty, maybe. That was a good age to feel, wasn’t it? You knew who you were then. You weren’t still flighty or unsure, but you had not yet had time to harden, to become unyielding.
The truth was that you felt a certain way inside, and while the people who had known you your whole life would probably see you that way, the number of new people who could appreciate you as that person, that inside person, rather than just a collection of the frailties of age, was limited.
And Irene no longer had too many people around who’d known her her whole life. Almost all of her old friends, hers and William’s, had moved out of the city, many of them years ago, to be nearer to children or grandchildren. At the time it hadn’t bothered Irene all that much, because as long as she had William, she never felt remotely lonely. And then one bright March morning six years ago, William went off to get the newspaper and he never came home; he dropped dead in the newsagent’s from a heart attack. Irene thought he was strong as an ox, she thought he’d go on forever; she thought she might die from the shock, at first, but then that wore off, and the grief came, and that was worse.
* * *
A door slammed and Irene jumped. It was next door; Irene was well accustomed to the particular timbre of the front door slamming. She struggled to her feet, leaning forward to see out the window, but there was no one there. Carla, presumably, doing God knows what. Angela had been gone for two months and still Carla came to the house, day after day, “sorting through things,” though Irene struggled to imagine what there was to sort; Angela hadn’t had much. They came from money, Carla and Angela, but somehow Carla seemed to have ended up with most of it. Angela had the house, of course, but nothing else. She eked out a meager living doing freelance editing and copywriting work. She’d had her child young, that was the thing. His father was one of her university professors. There was an unhappy affair, an unexpected pregnancy, and Angela’s life was derailed. She’d had a difficult time of it, Irene was aware; she’d struggled a great deal, with the money and the child-rearing and all her demons.