We are going away for the weekend, and Constance is coming with us. This part of the arrangement is kept from me until the last minute.
“In the car?” I say.
“I said we’d give her a lift,” my wife says. “I told her not to get here before 2.30.”
At 1.30 the doorbell rings, and I pick up the entryphone.
“Let me in,” Constance says. “I’m starving.”
“Why are you so early?” shouts my wife from the top of the stairs.
“What does it matter?” Constance says, on her way from the doorstep to the fridge.
At 2.30 I carry our bags out to the car. From across the road I can hear Constance and my wife bickering through our open front door. Eventually they emerge, the little dog following. My wife walks round to the driver’s side, and Constance pulls open the passenger door.
“Wait, am I in the back?” I say. The doors both shut and the engine starts. I climb into the back seat, next to the dog.
“Why am I in the back?” I say.
“If you sat up here you’d just look at your phone, and then fall asleep,” my wife says. “At least she chats.” Constance turns round and arches her eyebrows in triumph. I look at my phone.
The back seat is incredibly uncomfortable. By the time we reach the motorway I feel trapped and powerless. No wonder my children were so badly behaved for all those years, punching each other over the colour of a wine gum.
In the front seat Constance is telling my wife a story about finding the couple who live upstairs from her naked in the hallway, locked out of their flat. I’m keenly interested in certain details, but I’m having trouble hearing over the noise of the engine and the radio.
“They were like, can you get us some clothes?” Constance says. “So I put them in matching outfits.”
“Why were they naked in the hallway?” my wife says. I’ve nearly constructed a joke employing the phrase “common parts”, but I’m never going to get it to work from the back seat.
“I’m bored,” I say.
“Would you like a biscuit?” Constance says, proffering an open packet. “I brought biscuits for the journey.”
“Did you take those from our cupboard?” I say. She arches her eyebrows again.
My book is in my bag, just out of reach, but I have headphones. I clamp them over my ears and search through my phone. I find a podcast in which people are discussing the American election from a statistical point of view. It is very soothing, and soporific – I am asleep within minutes.
When I regain consciousness the podcast is over and the car is stationary, stuck in traffic somewhere west of Oxford. I pull off the headphones and rub my eyes. Up in the front, my wife and Constance are talking about somebody they both know, some man.
“So, nothing,” Constance says.
“Nothing,” my wife says. “Completely broke.” Some loser, I think.
“But you liked him at that point,” Constance says.
“I suppose,” my wife says.
“Even though he’s basically freeloading,” Constance says.
“No, he always worked,” my wife says. “An endless series of shit jobs.”
I realise they are talking about me; the me of 30 years ago, a version of myself that doesn’t feel too distant as I sit slumped against my shoulder belt, forehead damp, eyes itching, trapped in the back with a panting dog.
“When did he finally start to come good?” Constance says.
“I’m not sure I understand your question,” my wife says. I put the headphones back over my ears and stare up at the leaden sky, listening to compressed silence.
