This is the Life. Alex Shearer

then, like Louis wanted me to ask a question or needed some prompt to continue. I wanted to sound politely curious but not pruriently nosy.

      ‘Wow, well, that’s pretty direct, Louis. No kind of preamble then? Just straight out with the main question.’

      ‘Well, I don’t know what came over me. It just came out.’

      It had to have been about seven years since he’d split up with Kirstin. I wondered if he’d been celibate all that time, but that’s not the kind of question you ask your brother.

      ‘So how did she react? What did she say?’

      ‘Well—’

      I heard a faint but colourful chuckle.

      ‘Well – she said okay.’

      ‘Really?’

      ‘Yeah.’

      ‘Just like that!’

      ‘Yeah. Just like that!’

      ‘Were you surprised?’

      ‘I was shocked at myself for saying it!’

      ‘Well – well done.’

      That was pretty inappropriate, but I didn’t know what else to say right then.

      ‘Yeah,’ Louis agreed, then went silent again, as if maybe fishing for further queries or compliments.

      ‘So – eh – how did that go?’

      ‘Great. And then she asked me to stay to dinner.’

      ‘Least she could do,’ I said.

      ‘I mean, I’ve known Terri for years,’ Louis said. ‘And always liked her. But not, you know—’

      ‘In that way?’

      ‘No. But just sitting there, well, I don’t know what came over me.’

      ‘Lust?’ I suggested. But Louis just laughed.

      ‘I’m going back to see her again next week,’ he said.

      ‘So it could be a regular thing.’

      ‘Have to see,’ he said.

      I still had the feeling that he would have appreciated a few more questions but I couldn’t think of any. And he never asked me about my sex life. In fact Louis never asked me much about my own life at all. His baseline appeared to be that my life was okay and further enquiries were not necessary and would have been superfluous.

      ‘Well, I hope it all works out,’ I said.

      ‘Yeah,’ Louis said, and he was sounding a little pleased with himself now, I thought, as if he was the only man in the world to have persuaded a woman into bed, which annoyed me somewhat, as I’d done a bit of that too in my time, in a modest way, but who hasn’t?

      We chatted a little while longer and then we hung up, promising to talk again soon.

      It was my turn to call and I rang him a couple of weeks later.

      ‘How’s it going, Louis? How are things with Terri?’

      ‘Oh, okay. Okay.’

      ‘Still seeing her?’

      ‘Oh yes. I go round once a week and help out at the bungalow and do a little decorating or whatever, and then stay for dinner and, you know – do the business.’

      ‘Do the business?’

      ‘You know, do the business.’

      ‘You’ve got such a poetic way with you, Louis.’

      ‘Well, you know, whatever you want to call it.’

      ‘So it’s all going fine.’

      ‘Seems to be.’

      ‘Good.’

      And I was pleased and to quite an extent relieved that Louis had someone else to unload his woes on, someone with a warm and sympathetic and absorbent shoulder on which to cry. I wondered if they’d move in together, he and Terri. But next time he called, things were under stress.

      ‘Hi, Louis, how’s it going?’

      ‘Ah – not too bad.’

      ‘How’s Terri?’

      ‘Aw, okay. I don’t see so much of her.’

      ‘Why’s that? I thought you were getting on.’

      ‘Well, I got a bit pissed off, to be honest.’

      To cut a long one short, whenever Louis went round to see Terri she had some little chore waiting for him – a dripping tap to be fixed, a washer to be put on, a sash cord to be replaced. And then, one afternoon, it was a favour for a neighbour, and then another neighbour, for the street seemed to be full of women on their own, ex-wives and widows, who all had small jobs around the house needing done by somebody both handy and reliable.

      According to Louis – by implication, if not outright expression – the price of sex was some initial house maintenance, and he was starting to feel resentful; he was starting to feel used.

      ‘She always needs something done,’ he complained. ‘Or, if not her, one of her friends. And I’ve already done a day’s work. Then I’m going round there and spending another couple of hours unblocking drains or whatever. I’m just getting a bit pissed off.’

      Next time we spoke, he hadn’t seen Terri since the last time we’d talked. Intimacy was over. But they remained friendly. She even offered to have Louis to come and live with her for his last few months. But he wouldn’t go. He wanted to stay independent, and maybe he was worried about the DIY.

      So that was his version. But there is another.

       3

       PLUMBING

      We were sitting in Louis’ living room, which was all red, dust-matted carpet and Salvation Army furniture with the price stickers still on, and cheap plastic curtains that didn’t quite fit the windows, and which were coming off the end of the tracking for lack of stops.

      The hand-basin in the bathroom took an hour to drain, so each time you used it, it filled up. You’d brush your teeth and spit out the toothpaste into the sink and the stuff would stay there and you couldn’t wash it away. The kitchen sink was the same. In the shower you had exactly one minute before the tray filled up and began to overflow.

      I said we should get a plumber around but Louis was against it.

      ‘It’s screwed,’ he said. ‘It’s no use. We’re screwed. The whole thing’s screwed.’

      I’d been trying to encourage him with tales I’d read on the internet of long-term survivors, people who’d had the surgery and the radio and the chemo and had lived on for five, six, seven years and were still going. He appeared to make an effort to believe me, and I thought I saw a flash of optimism in the milky eyes, but then he got upset about the drugs he had to take and whether he’d taken some out of sequence.

      ‘We’re screwed,’ he said. ‘It’s no good. We’re screwed.’

      I tried to convince Louis that we weren’t screwed.

      ‘They’ve got us by the balls and curlies,’ he said.

      ‘We’re not screwed, Louis,’ I said. ‘They don’t have us by the balls and curlies. We’re not without resources, are we? We’ve come this far and look what we’ve survived. We’ve got through all that and we’re still going.’

      ‘Maybe,’ Louis said. ‘But now we’re screwed.’