Benjamin Gold was sitting on the bed in a damp shirt staring at nothing when Susannah, his wife, put her head around the door of their old bedroom.
“I told Aaron to go to bed. He looks pale. I said you’d say goodnight.” She waited politely for him to leave so she could undress.
“You all right, son?”
“Fucking wonderful.”
“I mean do you feel ill?” Ben placed his hand on Aaron’s forehead.
Aaron, who was perched rigidly on the edge of his unmade bed, shook him off. “Leave me alone. Fuck’s sake.”
Ben hadn’t been in here for a while. There were mouldy cups, a torn maths book and a half-eaten bowl of Shreddies on the floor.
“If I turn my phone off, will you leave, Dad?” Aaron proffered the hated object at his father.
Aaron’s pupils were too large.
“What were you doing down on the beach?” Ben inspected his socked feet, which looked so much like his own father’s. “Aaron, do you remember your Grandfather Moses?”
“Mostly from photos. He gave me that abacus, didn’t he?” Aaron was pulling threads from the edge of a blue quilt with yellow ducklings on it, which Susannah’s sister had made for him when he was a baby.
“The abacus!” A beautiful image of red-faced Aaron, age two, repeatedly throwing the cumbersome object at a wall and yelling his delight with the clatter it made, rose in Ben’s mind. “I’m coming to check on you in ten minutes, understand?”
“Dad, I’m nearly sixteen.”
“Ten minutes.”
“Okay, but fuck off.”
Ben leaned down for a hug. Aaron blocked him. “Mum told me Grandpa Moses was some kind of genius and that’s where I...
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