Our Picnics in the Sun (11 page)

Adam could believe it, though. What he couldn’t believe was that his mother could come out with such remarks without irony or embarrassment. It would shock her to learn how very
long
in passing the twenty-one years seemed to him, how far away and aloof from his childhood he felt and had perhaps always wanted to feel. But then, pretty much everything shocked her, because she hadn’t a clue what was really going on half the time, not even in her own mind let
alone anyone else’s. She had no idea, for example, that he hated the big fuss she made of his birthday, that he couldn’t stand the way she acted all incredulous and relieved as if it was a surprise to her that the date came around every year—what else did she expect? But she’d always been like that, taken aback by the obvious, never knowing with any conviction anything beyond the obvious. Never really
thinking
, because that way she could let the stupidest things go on appearing to be important. Birthday picnics, for example. It made him furious that she would go to all that trouble when, with or without B & B guests, she was always busy and mostly tired. No, that wasn’t the truth; what made him furious was that all the effort she made forced him to be spectacularly grateful, when all he wished for was that she would just stop making it. He couldn’t find it in himself to tell her that the birthday picnics were pointless, that even when he was little they hadn’t been that much fun. Instead, year after year, overwhelmed by the same paralyzing surge of tact, he went along with the fucking birthday picnic, furious that his gratitude made him complicit in the pretense that everything was lovely.

It wasn’t even that he
wasn’t
grateful, exactly. It just took it out of him, the strenuous show of appreciation for the dredged-up “favorite” picnic recipes, the clumsy baking, the finger-crossing for a fine day; it all brought a lump to his throat. But he could never withhold his gratitude. She would be hurt. Another thing for which Adam had always felt unreasonably and painfully accountable was how easily she was hurt.

At least this year the picnic would be short, because the firing that should have got under way first thing still hadn’t been started. With a bit of luck (or mismanagement on Howard’s part) there might not be enough time at all. That would be easiest, really. He couldn’t quite picture himself giving them the news he had to give them up there on the windy moor; the kitchen with the flat ticking clock was a more amenable setting for difficult news and of course would allow him a quicker getaway than the desolate trudge back down from the picnic. He watched his mother clear away the paper she’d wrapped the shirt in, folding it to keep, and bit his lip to prevent any observation about another of her futile little economies. He merely vowed privately,
sucking in his breath, that never, ever, no matter how poor he might be, would he recycle a bit of wrapping paper.

Adam heaved himself from his chair, carried their coffee cups to the sink, and made for the door to the hall.

“You will wear it today, won’t you?” his mother said. “I’m dying to see it on.”

Adam returned and picked up the shirt. “ ’Course. I’ll put it on later. Don’t want to get it dirty helping with the logs, do I?”

She didn’t reply. Both his parents had weird and awkward smiles on their faces.

“What?” he said.

“Surprise!” his mother said. “Birthday surprise! Picnic surprise! Nobody’s doing logs. We’re going for a lovely
early
walk up on the moor and the birthday picnic!”

Jesus Christ, he thought, does she think I’m ten years old? “Mum, really, as far as I’m concerned the birthday’s no big deal, honest,” he said. “I mean, it’s great of you to do it and everything but there’s lots to get on with here, isn’t there? Dad’s doing a firing. We can leave off the picnic, can’t we? I don’t need a picnic. I’m twenty-one, not twelve.”

“But that’s
why
,” she said. “Twenty-one! Of course we’re having a birthday picnic! Oh Adam, your face! Howard, tell him!”

Howard ran his fingers through his majestic hair. “I’m not doing a firing. There isn’t enough stuff ready to fill the kiln,” he said. His voice was heavy with resignation at his lack of productivity. “I’m not in the studio so much these days.” He lifted his eyes and stared nobly out of the window. Jesus Christ, Adam thought. He’s actually proud of how little he does, he wants me to applaud it. How does he do it? How does he turn making nothing into something more significant than making a lot?

He asked, “Really? So if you’re not in the studio, what
are
you doing? You can’t be hoeing lettuces the whole time.”

Howard removed a beard hair from his mouth. “Your mother wanted you to think I was doing a firing so the picnic would be more of a surprise,” he said. “Even though there’s always a picnic on your birthday.”

“I wanted it to be a
special
surprise!” Deborah said, laughing.

“Oh Mum,” Adam said, smiling as hard as he could manage. To his father he said, “So, no firing.”

“Well, indeed, no. A firing’s a firing. And a picnic’s a picnic,” Howard said slowly and expectantly, as if some point to the words might occur to someone once he’d spoken them aloud.

“And the sheep are the sheep, remember,” his wife said, sighing and rising from the table. “They need checking. You didn’t go up yesterday.”

“They’re fine now they’re sheared. I’ll check them today. You still haven’t washed the fleeces.”

“Well, anyway,” Deborah said, “thank goodness Digger’s brought some logs up at last, in case you
do
do a firing.”

“I’m not in a position to do a firing.”

“But if you were, now you can.”

“I don’t know I can, even if I did do one. No two firings are the same. And I’m not doing one, so either way it’s the same, there’s no difference. Any more than you haven’t washed the fleeces yet.”

“What’s no difference? The same as what? You just said no two
were
the same.”

“That’s not what I mean. It was you that brought up the fleeces. Anyway, of course they’re never the same.”

All this was conducted in a placid, secure shared rhythm, as together Deborah and Howard washed and dried the coffee cups. Adam gazed from one parent to the other and wondered how long it had been since either of them had spoken more than a couple of words to anyone but the other. He began to wonder if they were going mad. Certainly they were becoming the kind of people who use words without meaning anything by them at all, people whose conversation, to the ears of any sane person, was a doomed verbal chase down a rabbit hole after sense and understanding.

Later, walking up the track behind his mother, Adam tried to collect the words he would need to tell her he was leaving that night. He knew from the way she was walking, in slow easy strides, her head tipping now and then upward to the sky, that she was for the moment happy; he yearned to keep her so and at the same time wished
that her happiness had nothing to do with him. His bag was packed and waiting in his bedroom, his clapped-out old Nissan was in the yard. Let his father, lagging some way behind, take care of her happiness.

Each of them walked alone and spaced out from the others. After an hour or so they’d gone as far up the moor as they usually went, to the old stand of trees under the ridge. Deborah threw down the rug on a patch of grass and Adam kicked away a few thistles and the scattering of rabbit and sheep droppings nearby. Over the ridge and away to the left, their sheep grazed the edge of the damp wooded combe that ran downward, slicing deep into the hill. The afternoon had clouded over and the trees sprouting in the crack of the gulley were almost black in the shadows.

The wind was too brisk for wasps or mosquitoes but also too brisk to sit in comfortably for long. It was also, to Adam’s relief, too windy to light the birthday cake candles, though his mother went through a whole box of matches in the attempt. Eventually she handed out slices of cake with her large cold hands and they ate fast, with a pretense of appetite. Deborah had brought ice cream but didn’t have any herself, and Adam discreetly tipped most of his into the ground. Howard fed his into his mouth without a glimmer of pleasure. His silence had deepened into a sulk; it occurred to Adam that his father never did enjoy anything that was somebody else’s idea. Within twenty minutes the picnic was over. Adam, in a show of tired contentment, leaned back and closed his eyes, wondering how soon he could decently begin his leave-taking speech. Howard murmured something about checking the sheep and wandered off. A few moments later when Deborah let out a long, stagy sigh and said wasn’t it all lovely, Adam pretended to be asleep.

Another picture of Melanie flashed into his mind, and for a moment he imagined bringing her up here and fucking her on the picnic rug. It was the sort of thing that would make her laugh. Maybe he’d text her later. Maybe if they got together again he’d be able to like her properly—after all, she was great, really. Thinking about it, fucking anybody up here on the rug would be pretty good, wouldn’t it? But the idea would not take hold, or rather everything about the idea
except the actual fucking depressed him. The rug depressed him, the surrounding thistles and animal turds depressed him. Being up on the moor depressed him. It bored him. He sat up and looked around. He hated the whole place. His mother was sitting on a rock with her eyes closed, clasping her bent knees and smiling up at the sky. Her lower legs were veined and hairy. The brown skirt had ridden up and Adam could see the backs of her thighs, somehow vulnerable for all that they were so big. Didn’t she know she was revealing all that flesh, or did she know and not care? How did she manage to make such a thing of sitting and saying nothing, being so carefully quiet as if she were a child and still making up her mind how to behave?

Howard had stopped on the moorside several yards away and taken up a shepherdlike pose, staring across the ridge at his sheep, one hand folded over the head of his stick, the other stroking his beard. He was wearing a baggy smock that flapped girlishly around his body and his long hair streamed out behind him. Just then Deborah opened her eyes and called out to him, and he raised a hand, turned, and made his way slowly back. Maybe I am not normal, Adam thought. Maybe something in me is distorted. I am twenty-one years old, not a resentful adolescent anymore, but it really could be the case that I hate my parents.

After Howard sat down again Adam waited another ten minutes, during which there was a bit more offering and taking of picnic food. Nobody spoke much.

“Listen, I’m sorry it’s a bit of a flying visit, this,” he said. “I did tell you, didn’t I? I need to be off a bit later.”

“Off? Off where?” his mother said. “You don’t mean
today
? Where are you off to?”

“I have to go back to Leicester.”

“But you’ve just finished at Leicester,” Howard said.

“Oh, you mean go back to pack up your things? Will you get everything in your car?” his mother asked. “Shall I come up in the van as well? We could all go up!”

“No, I mean I’m going back properly, to stay. For another two years. I’m doing an MBA.” His parents didn’t speak. “It’s a post-graduate
degree. Master of Business Administration. It’s all sorted, I’ve been accepted. Term starts last week of September.”

“Another degree?” Howard said. “And what would be the point of that?” The question wasn’t neutral, of course. Part of Howard’s credo of the general fucked-up-ness of the world’s systems and institutions was that formal education was shallow and overrated. Adam knew that when he’d demanded to be allowed to go to school after ten years of home schooling, he’d defected from one of his father’s core beliefs. He also knew while anger was against Howard’s principles (all those negative energies), he’d never really got over it.

“A master of what did you say,
Business Administration
?” his mother said. “But you’ve just spent three years doing
Business Studies
. Won’t it just be more of the same thing?” She picked out the words as if she were naming a disease, or a vice.

“Look, there’s no point arguing about it. I’m doing an MBA. I’m not asking you for anything, I’ll be paying for it.”

“But what for, Adam?
Why
do you want to do it?” Deborah asked.

Adam ground his back teeth. A typical Mum question, while what she would never, ever ask was
how
he was doing it, how he would manage to pay for it all. She wouldn’t be interested that he’d be working his arse off for the next two years to earn enough to live on as well as study. He said, “Mum, the MBA—it’s a recognized thing. Everybody knows about the MBA. It’s a … a sort of passport, okay? It helps you get a better career.” He cleared his throat. “
Everybody
knows that.”

“I’ve never heard of it,” his father said.

No, you wouldn’t, would you, Adam thought. You make certain you never hear about anything real, anything that’s part of the real world. He shrugged. “Well, just about everybody else has. Everybody but you and Mum knows an MBA gets you a higher starting salary, for one thing. Faster promotion. An MBA,”—he paused to draw breath for the next bit—“an MBA represents a high-recognition, value-added skillset with high transferability potential across a wide range of industry sectors.”

That struck them dumb, as he intended.

But only for a moment. Howard snorted. “Oh, I see, a higher starting salary. Money. Of course,” he said. “An MBA—Money Before Anything. Eh? Big salary, flash car—oh, yes. Thoughtless consumption, is that what you want? Selling your soul in the process.” He paused. “One day, Adam, I hope you’ll find out there are more important things than money.”

“Oh, yes? And what would they be?” Adam said. “Really. What things? I mean, for instance, what have you got that’s so much better than money?”

“Adam!” his mother said.

He stood up. “No, really. Go on, Dad, tell me. What? Your mangy sheep, your dump of a smallholding?”

Howard had assumed the stillness of a stone figure, staring into the wind, and did not look at him.

“Adam, please—don’t,” his mother said.

“It’s okay, forget it,” Adam said. “We’ve had this conversation before, anyway. We’ll never agree.”