Lorenzo gets into position. Eddie Kettering gets into position. The soldiers get into position. The extras playing the prostitutes get into position. The scene begins.
Tuck Shop
Laura and Bastian sit together on the swing seat in the garden. The hinges are rusted and squeak when pressure is applied. The garden is overgrown. There are brown patches where the dog has urinated. Laura owns a plump Staffordshire bull terrier cross, called Flora, who has a prominent underbite. On the patio, there is moss, pieces of broken concrete. The plastic garden furniture seems to have rotted, causing Bastian to wonder whether a new strain of bacteria has developed in this garden that can devour hydrocarbons, which can be cultivated and nurtured and spread across the oceans to save the turtles, albatrosses, sea horses and prawns from discarded water bottles and microplastics.
“Did you feel this way two years ago?” asks Laura.
Bastian thinks about her question. “Yes,” he says. “But I wouldn’t have known to give it that name. I wouldn’t have known what name to give it.”
Laura nods slowly, reflectively.
Then Bastian asks, “How did you feel about that time?”
Laura looks at him and also thinks about the question.
“A lot of it is a blur,” she says. “My main thoughts and memories about the time we spent together are associated with how it finished. I guess I felt pretty bitter about it all.”
“Bitter?”
“Well, yeah. I’m over it now, but it hurt. It really hurt.”
“Why hurt?” Bastian turns to Laura and the swing seat clunks and screeches.
“Are you serious?” She can tell from his expression that he is. “You dumping me and just going back to your girlfriend. That hurt.”
“That’s not how it happened.”
“Yes it is.”
“No. I mean, I got back together with Rebecca but I didn’t dump you.”
“Oh, I’m sorry, are we still together? I didn’t realize.”
They sit in silence. Bastian’s fingers find a rip in the swing-seat cushion, and he begins to fret the synthetic lining. He never realized Laura wanted anything more. She had always seemed so confident, so in control of what she wanted and when. What he said was his true reflection on events, but it now seems his interpretation was skewed.
He had arrived at Laura’s house just after lunchtime. It was she who opened the door, which he’d been hoping for. He knew she lived with her mum and younger siblings and was dreading the process of introducing himself to them before he’d had a chance to see Laura and explain his arrival.
After a while, Laura says, “You know, Bastian, it is possible not to depend totally on the approval of other people but also to care. I wanted you. And when you went back to her it hurt.”
One of Laura’s little brothers comes out of the house with a football under his arm, which is so large compared to his skinny frame he looks like an ant carrying a bulky item of booty. The boy shuffles forward awkwardly.
“What is it?” Laura asks him.
“Ryan and me have got football practice.”
“Ryan and I,” Laura corrects.
“Ryan and I have got football practice, only Simon’s mum can’t come pick us up because they’re in Tenerife.”
“So what do you want me to do about it?”
“Will you take us in the car?”
The boy drops the football and takes hold of his T-shirt, pulling it away from his body and wringing it through his hands. He holds his weight on one foot and then the other. His eyes skip between his sister and Bastian and the ground and the sky.
Laura sighs dramatically. It’s a sigh that adults reserve for children.
“Why didn’t you tell me about this sooner?”
“Forgot.”
“When did Simon’s mum tell you they were going to be away?”
“Don’t know.”
“Oh, for goodness sake, Curtis.”
Laura gets up from the swing seat and it falls back and creaks loudly. Bastian plants his feet firmly on the ground to steady it.
“You coming?” Laura says to him.
Bastian would have been happy to go anywhere with Laura but tries not to seem overly enthusiastic. He gets up and follows Laura and Curtis back into the house and waits while the boys rush around collecting their things while Laura shouts instructions at them and looks at her watch pointedly and goes out to the car to start the engine and honk the horn aggressively.
Bastian enjoys seeing this side of her. He sits in the front seat with her and the boys sit in the back with their mess of shin pads and socks and water bottles and goalie gloves.
They drive to the sports ground and the lads go off to join their football training while Bastian and Laura stand together on the sidelines talking.
Laura works for a charitable trust that funds food banks, homeless shelters and support services across the north, but she’s currently looking for a new job.
“Whatever you do,” she says, “don’t go and work for a charity. Believe me. In general, they treat their employees like shit.”
“I was thinking of doing some volunteering,” says Bastian. “I’ve recently been feeling this need to be a better person, but Glenda says volunteering denigrates the value of labor and that charities prop up capitalism.”
“Fuck Glenda. I mean, she’s probably right, as per usual, but do what you want.” Laura laughs.
“Are you set on staying up this way?” Bastian asks.
“I’ve not got much choice. Someone’s got to look after my mum and the kids. But also, I guess I feel a kind of weird commitment to the area. Most people who get Cambridge degrees—first class, by the way—fuck off to London afterwards. But, I don’t know, I like it up here.”
“No, I get that. I sometimes fantasize about moving to Cornwall,” says Bastian.
“Why Cornwall?”
“It’s my favorite place in the world, probably. I used to go there for the summer when I was a child, back when my mum and dad were still together. Mum used to spend all day painting the sea and the moors and lanes, and I had this, Enid Blyton-esque childhood.”
“Lots of tongue sandwiches and
