The Other Son Read Online Free Page B

too. Lisa certainly hated Ken first. But what with Lisa moving to New Zealand, and Jenny Mayer dying; what with Jenny Parson now a full-blown alcoholic, that only leaves Dot. So no matter what Ken thinks, Alice isn’t going to give Dot up.
    Lisa has been gone over twenty years now and still Alice misses her. She was the friend Alice felt closest to, the only one who ever really laughed at her jokes. It was a shock when Lisa and Jim moved away, a shock to have to realise that your biggest, most important friendship just didn’t weigh that much in the grand scheme of things, not when balanced against a better lifestyle, a bigger house with a pool and a major promotion for Jim. It’s normal to lose friends over the course of a lifetime: you fall out with some, you grow apart from others. A few die too. But to have someone just move to the other side of the world, well, that’s tough. And one thing’s for sure – it’s less and less easy to make new friends as you get older, there are so few opportunities for it.
    Still, she has Dot, thank God. Dot gets on with her own husband Martin about as well as Alice gets on with Ken, so it’s a relationship based largely on bitching. But bitching, it turns out, is a surprisingly solid basis for a friendship. At the thought of the things they say, at the conversations they have about their respective husbands, Alice snorts almost undetectably. Ken, usually so slow to pick up any kind of subtlety, catches this one immediately.
    “What?” he asks.
    “Oh nothing,” Alice says. “I was just thinking about those Christmas decorations in Tesco.” When you have a tetchy husband, you develop coping mechanisms, such as always having an alibi at the ready.
    One time, a couple of years back, Alice had been telling Dot what a relief it was that Ken no longer wanted to have sex. Dot had been laughing, lapping it up, goading Alice to go further, to be funnier and ruder. Alice had said something about Ken’s wrinkly wiener – a phrase she had heard on an American sitcom – and Dot had spat her wine all over the dining-table. But then they had heard a tiny voice coming seemingly from nowhere. “Hello, hello?” it said. Alice finally traced the little voice to her new mobile phone in her handbag. It had somehow dialled home, had mysteriously and, under the circumstances, dangerously , called Ken.
    Terrified that he had overheard part of their conversation, and wracked with guilt, Alice had literally been trembling by the time she opened the front door that evening. But she had found Ken sober, calmly watching television. He had complained about the phone bill, of course. He had reminded her “for the thousandth time” to lock the keyboard – whatever that means. But that was it. She had got away with it. She was always very careful with her mobile after that.
    “Chinese tyres,” Ken says prompting Alice to look out of the side window at the lorry they are overtaking. It says “Imperial Tyres” on the side.
    “Imperial doesn’t sound very Chinese,” Alice comments.
    “Well it’s not meant to, is it? That’s the point. That’s why they do it,” Ken says. “So you think they’re English.”
    “I suppose they did have an empire once.”
    “The Chinese?”
    “I think so.”
    “Well, empire or not, their tyres are rubbish. Dangerous rubbish, at that.”
    “You just don’t like the fact that they’re cheaper than remoulds,” Alice says. She has heard Ken say this enough times to know that it is true.
    “You’re right. I don’t,” Ken says. “But they’re still rubbish. That Which magazine tested them all and the braking distances on the Chinky ones were terrible.”
    Alice watches as the tyre truck indicates, then veers away from them, apparently taking its slippery Chinese tyres to rainy Blackburn. It’s funny, because she thinks that she can smell the load it’s carrying from here but it’s probably just her memory, it’s probably just because of the