The Standing Pool by Adam Thorpe

Author:Adam Thorpe
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House

TEN

The washing line in front of the trees bore a holed sweater, wan tee shirt, encrusted socks and faded boxer-shorts alongside a multi-pocketed, vaguely military pair of trousers, stiff with use, and an Arab burnous whose hood dangled like a head. They hung shamefacedly next to the kids’ togs like those dead crows farmers suspend from barbed-wire fences, stinking and turning slowly to bone. Sarah recalled hanging those same trousers up when he was still in the sixth form, but that was seven years ago. Jamie was twenty-four or twenty-five. It was not her job to remember her stepson’s birthday. Or maybe it was, because Nick never remembered.

Jamie was not visiting. He was staying. Since the girls thought their half-brother was good fun, they were happy. He’d always popped up like that, without warning. This time it was a text message activated only when his father had stood on the chair in the bathroom to check, as he did twice a day. Jamie was not only in the country, and not only in town, he was in a tiny hamlet three kilometres away. Nick and Sarah had to consult a detailed map from a drawer, trying to hide their dismay, their thumping hearts, hoping Jamie had his geography wrong and the hamlet lay at the other end of France or even the world.

‘It’s not in New Caledonia, after all,’ sighed Nick.

‘I don’t believe it, shit,’ Sarah murmured. ‘I was just beginning to relax. This is unbelievable.’ A vague sense of chaos invaded her, the empire’s borders falling to wild hooves.

‘It’ll be fine,’ said Nick. ‘He won’t stay long, it’s too remote.’

‘Hooray!’ the girls yelled, when Jamie stepped out of the car an hour later. It had not been easy tracking him down, even in a hamlet. He was dressed in a long earth-brown hooded mantle and carried a huge stained ex-army swag shaped like a sausage; he couldn’t even go round with a rucksack, like everyone else. He had a discreet butterfly tattooed on the back of his neck; Sarah thought it was dirt and tried to brush it off. They laughed. It usually started well, with Jamie.

For the last year, he told them, he’d been part of a Canadian circus without animals. This did not surprise the girls; nothing surprised them about their big brother. They didn’t, however, know he had circus skills, since their father would complain (at bad moments) of his son’s lack of any skills – basic, circus, or otherwise. He was short and wiry with small girlish features, a legacy of his now-plump mother. His hair was still the same, gathered in a plaited knot like those on Germanic tribes described by Tacitus. One of Nick’s colleagues had pointed this out: an Iron Age specialist. Nick had assured him it was an accidental reference.

‘I was a carer,’ Jamie informed them.

‘Of the lions?’

He went pffff, and said: ‘That would’ve been a cinch compared to my job?’

One of the trapeze artists had fallen eighty metres two years

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