Only Twelve Times

Headlights By half past five, Max had been accused of losing a PE top, putting a frying pan in the wrong cupboard and knowing perfectly well that the school photograph order had to be in by Friday. Only the last accusation was true, and even that depended on how strictly you defined knowing. He was aware of a deadline. He had written PHOTO in large letters on the back of an electricity bill and put it somewhere he wouldn't forget, which was a system with an obvious weakness but had served him well enough until recently. Kerri found the bill stuck to the underside of the bread bin. She peeled it away, held it up between finger and thumb and waited while Max decided whether to defend himself. ‘There,’ he said. ‘Exactly where I meant to leave it.’ ‘It's got marmalade on it.’ Kerri put the bill beside his keys. Her phone was trapped between her shoulder and ear, and somebody from work was still explaining a problem she had, from the expression on her face, already solved. She listened another few seconds, told the caller she would email the details, then caught Max trying to wipe the sticky edge of the bill with his sleeve. ‘Please don't make that worse.’ ‘It's a domestic administration system. You're interfering with it.’ She pointed towards the counter, where three lunchboxes had disgorged an impressive collection of lids, straws and crumbs, and resumed her call. Max set the bill down and started matching lids to boxes. One lid fitted nothing in sight. He put it to one side in case the right box turned up, a principle Kerri considered responsible for most of the contents of their garage. Olivia was at the kitchen table with a laptop, revising a piece of coursework Max had already been warned against helping with. At sixteen she could tell him, without raising her voice or looking up, that his proposed improvements had introduced three factual errors into a perfectly satisfactory paragraph. She'd also learned to ignore the noises he made while reading over her shoulder. He left her alone, which he considered a generous concession on both sides. Erin occupied the other end of the table. She had secured a large sheet of paper under a pencil case, a mug and the television remote, and was drawing a cluster of buildings connected by narrow walkways. Their angles made Max mildly seasick, though the arrangement had plainly been worked out with care. She was fourteen, and for the last twenty minutes had been trying to explain why the windows on the far side needed to be smaller. ‘It's perspective,’ she said when he bent over the drawing again. ‘I know what perspective is. I'm interested in why you've given that one six windows and the one beside it four.’ ‘Because you can't see the other two. I've explained that.’ Erin tapped the paper with the blunt end of her pencil and demonstrated the line of sight, tracing it carefully above the drawing rather than leaving a mark on the roof. Max followed the argument until she reached the third building, at which point he lost it, but she was pleased that he'd asked a better question. Jack was on the rug with a team of plastic footballers who had been bought as a set and now represented at least five competing clubs. The goalkeeper had been stationed by a chair leg and was apparently serving a suspension. Jack, eight, narrated his own disciplinary hearings under his breath, giving each defendant a different voice. He interrupted himself to ask for another biscuit. ‘You've had one,’ Max said. ‘Two. Mum said ask you.’ ‘Well, that's an irresponsible thing for her to do.’ He fetched the packet anyway. Jack made an unsuccessful attempt to look as though he wasn't expecting success, and Max gave him a biscuit with instructions to keep it away from the rug. He offered Olivia one, which she refused without looking away from the screen. Erin accepted hers and immediately put it beside a clean piece of paper so the crumbs wouldn't fall on the drawing. Kerri ended her call and looked around the kitchen with the weary concentration she applied to unfinished jobs. ‘Your dad rang. He's convinced the timer on our heating is wrong again.’ ‘Has he been in the cupboard?’ ‘He says it was cold when he popped in yesterday, although the heating should've been on.’ Max shut the cupboard containing the plastic boxes, having failed to find the missing one. ‘He came at half past four. The heating comes on at six. This is the same discussion we had last week.’ Kerri suggested he ring Tony and explain it, which struck Max as an unreasonable request from somebody who'd heard him try twice already. ‘I'm going to draw him a clock,’ he told her. ‘With the numbers on.’ ‘You say that every time.’ She opened the fridge, frowned at the solitary carton of milk, then returned it to the shelf. ‘We're nearly out. And we need washing-up liquid. The proper stuff this time, not whatever you brought home that smells like a hotel toilet.’ ‘I thought it smelled all right.’ ‘You haven't washed up with it. That's why.’ Max could have challenged this. He washed up often enough, although Kerri maintained that moving dishes from the sink to the draining board without checking them didn't constitute washing. He chose not to reopen the dispute. They'd been together long enough to know when an argument wasn't going to improve with repetition, even if both still sometimes tried. Outside, the streetlights had come on while a little of the day's pale brightness remained above the gardens. He'd been planning to walk down to the shops anyway. One of his trainers had worn through at the heel, and after several weeks of allowing the lining to take skin off his foot he'd decided he ought to do something about it. The shoe shop would be closed now, but the convenience store stayed open late, and the milk was the more urgent problem according to Kerri's hierarchy of domestic disasters. ‘I'll go,’ he said, lifting his coat from the back of the chair. ‘Take a bag. A shopping bag, Max, not one of the little wine ones.’ She was collecting the lunchboxes he'd just sorted, apparently intending to do the job again. When he protested that he knew how shopping worked, she asked why there were seventeen carrier bags in his car and none in the kitchen. He had no explanation that would satisfy her, so he went to the hall cupboard and retrieved a folded canvas bag from underneath the dog towels, although they hadn't owned a dog in four years. Jack followed him with a footballer in each hand. ‘Dad, if the goalkeeper gets sent off, can he still be captain?’ Max sat on the bottom stair to pull on his shoes. ‘What's he been sent off for?’ ‘He punched someone. But he's the best captain.’ ‘Probably makes him a less good captain, doesn't it? Depends who he punched, I suppose.’ Jack thought this over with an expression of grave irritation. Max tried to imagine a disciplinary tribunal in which punching the opposition was acceptable leadership and gave up. ‘Let him keep the armband if you want. He'll have to apologise.’ ‘He won't apologise. That's the problem.’ Jack headed back towards the living room to reconsider his squad selection, leaving Max with a damp sock and one shoe on. ‘Don't be ages,’ Kerri called from the kitchen. ‘How long can it take to buy milk?’ ‘With you? Anything's possible.’ Olivia wanted chocolate things in a blue packet. When he asked which ones, she told him the small ones, then claimed Mum knew. Max offered to take photographs of everything in the shop and let her choose from his phone. Olivia said that would take longer than buying the wrong ones and returning them, so he was to use his judgement. He informed her that his judgement had been criticised several times already this evening and couldn't be expected to work under such conditions. He passed Kerri on the way out and touched her shoulder. She caught his hand briefly, drawing him close enough to give him a quick kiss without interrupting the task of clearing the counter. ‘Milk,’ she reminded him, against his cheek. ‘I'll do my best.’ At the door Erin asked him not to put anything on her drawing when he came back. He'd left his keys on the corner earlier, she said, and the pressure had made a small crease. Max started to defend the weight of his keys before seeing that she was genuinely annoyed. He went back, checked the corner and promised he'd keep things off it. Erin acknowledged the promise and returned to the drawing without further discussion. Nobody answered when he announced that this was their last chance to place an order before he left the country. He stepped outside, pulled the door shut and discovered that the canvas bag was inside his coat rather than in his hand. He spent a moment sorting himself out on the doorstep, where the neighbours couldn't see him wrestling with his own zip. The shop was ten minutes away on foot if he went along the main road and cut through the parade by the junction. He preferred walking in the evening, when traffic was busy enough to make driving irritating but the pavements were still largely empty. Across the road, a man was trying to persuade a dog to leave a wheelie bin alone. Max recognised the dog and raised a hand to its owner, who returned a distracted nod. The dog had apparently found something worth investigating and wasn't going anywhere. Tony had sent a message by the time Max reached the first crossing. It contained a photograph of the heating controls and the question IS THIS RIGHT. A second message followed: NO RUSH. Max knew from experience that this meant his father expected an answer before bedtime, preferably while he still had the cupboard open. He enlarged the picture. The timer was correctly set, just as it had been on the previous two occasions. He typed, YES IT IS RIGHT. SIX MEANS SIX PM, studied the words and deleted them. Instead he sent, Looks fine, Dad. Leave it as it is and I'll have a look at the weekend. Three dots appeared immediately. Max put the phone away before Tony could ask what temperature he was supposed to have it at when nobody was home. Inside the convenience store, the milk had moved to the back wall, displacing the bread, which was now beside a freezer so thoroughly coated with frost that he doubted anything had been sold from it since the summer. Max found the milk, selected the washing-up liquid that looked the least likely to provoke an argument and stood for some time in front of the chocolate. There were four blue packets. He picked one up, remembered Olivia saying small, put it back and bought the one he felt would be least disappointing if it turned out to be wrong. At the till he discovered a packet of batteries in his basket that he didn't remember adding. The woman serving pointed to them and asked whether he wanted them. He looked down at the batteries, tried to remember picking them up and admitted that apparently he did. She told him they were on offer, which explained a good deal. He paid and got out of the way of a man waiting behind him with a newspaper and two cans of lager. Outside, the traffic had thickened into a succession of brake lights. Max walked past a takeaway with its extractor fan rattling above the door and reached the crossing where the supermarket access road met the main carriageway. The junction had always been badly arranged. Vehicles turning into the slip road took it too quickly, and lorries approached the lights as though stopping was an unexpected administrative burden. He'd complained about it often enough, generally from the warmth of his own car, with the satisfaction of being in no position to do anything about it. His phone buzzed again. Kerri wanted to know if he'd remembered the milk. A second message followed immediately: JACK NOW CLAIMS YOU SAID HE CAN STAY UP FOR THE MATCH. Max had said nothing of the sort. He began typing a denial, then put the phone back in his pocket when he reached the kerb. There was no point trying to resolve the finer details of a conversation with an eight-year-old while crossing a road. Jack would have his argument ready by the time he got home, and Max would almost certainly end up conceding the first half. The pedestrian signal was red. A teenager wearing enormous headphones waited beside him, and a woman with a pushchair checked something beneath its canopy. Across the road, two people had stopped to talk in the middle of the pavement. Max shifted the shopping bag to his other hand. The washing-up liquid pressed an awkward hard edge into his fingers, and he regretted not buying a second bottle to balance the weight. The signal changed. The teenager moved first. Max stepped off the kerb beside him, then heard an engine rising in pitch to his right. He turned, expecting to see a car braking late. A large white truck was already coming through the junction, far too quickly, its broad front filling the road beyond the stopped traffic. There was a fluorescent jacket inside the cab and a black streak of dirt beneath the windscreen. Max could see both with horrible clarity, although he couldn't tell whether the driver had seen them. He dropped the bag and tried to get back to the pavement. The milk hit the road with a hollow crack. Somewhere beside him the teenager shouted. Max reached for the kerb, his weight moving the wrong way, and the truck was across the crossing before he could recover his footing.