Sea State by Tabitha Lasley

Author:Tabitha Lasley [Lasley, Tabitha]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2020-12-10T12:31:59+00:00

*

‘I wouldn’t dare buy them.’

‘No one’s asking you to,’ I said, turning the trainers over. They were lilac, with a floral patterned swoosh. ‘Air Max Ones are a design classic. I had a pair like this when I was fifteen. I wore them the first time I went to Bowlers. With a denim Wonderbra and denim knickers. This was back when you could go to Bowlers in your underwear and be left alone. It really went downhill after they got a bar.’

Caden looked back at me, his face impassive. He didn’t want to hear about me at fifteen, when Bowlers had no bar. He’d already looked through photos and pronounced me better now. I was greedy for his past, he was bored by mine. It was one of several small inequities I accepted without thinking about it any further. He picked up a pair of trainers exactly like the ones he was wearing. He meant to bin the ones he wore as soon as we got home. I stared when he said this. To me, they looked as clean and startlingly white as the day I first saw them.

‘You bin your shoes when they get dirty? Like Floyd Mayweather?’

‘They’ve got to be white white,’ he said. ‘Can’t cope with stains, me.’

He loved to shop, to tour the bright, air-conditioned cube of Union Square or the cold, brutalist tunnel of the Trinity Centre, buying things he didn’t need, or contemplating their purchase for another day. He had a zeal for accrual – the box fresh, the brand new, the untouched – but anticipating things he might buy in the near future gave him pleasure too. This was how he and Rachel filled their days when he was home. Staking out areas of acquisition. Shopping, spending, steadily consuming.

In John Lewis, he dismissed the racks of neat polo shirts and sports jackets (It’s got to be Ralph Lauren, Hugo Boss, or nothing), but paused at a fifty-inch flat screen. He had been profoundly shocked to learn I didn’t own a television. At home, he had eight: one in each bedroom, one in the lounge, one in the playroom, one in the conservatory and one in the bathroom. When I asked why he had a television in the bathroom, he looked at me as if I must be very stupid. Because sometimes, he explained, he wanted to watch television when he was in the bath.

In the Apple shop, he stopped in front of some expensive watches in a glass display case.

‘Might try and bribe the twins,’ he muttered.

Since this was said more to himself than me, it didn’t require an answer. In the privacy of my head, I’d already drawn my own conclusions about the twins (obscenely, ruinously spoiled), his parenting (poor) and what would happen if I were put in charge (they would be bundled into a calèche and conveyed due south, like the young Jonathan Harker, until they reached AFC Harrogate). Maybe Rachel would stay so consumed with fury she’d never let me meet them.

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