The Rules of Play Read Online Free Page B

brow over, trying to fit the words to the rhythm and balance, is an exquisitely formal little piece of work. It reminds me of being on the top floor of the V&A, looking at those polished brass instruments for finding where you are in the middle of the ocean. They have tiny coiled springs and cogs that slot together so perfectly you could become hypnotized watching them and scales marked in minuscule units of measurement, but they are trained on the stars, or the horizon. ‘ If the loss-adjuster had not been so continuously something, I would surely have something to something something. ’
    The eighteenth century: I think I am a bluestocking. My father would have been proud. (The loss-adjuster unrolling my blue stockings, his fingers light on the mesh . . . )
    What has woken me is the sound of the loss-adjuster chuckling. ‘Look at this,’ he says.
    On the TV, men in bright yellow jackets are running across the cricket field. A bomb? An injury?—but the loss-adjuster finds it funny. Then the camera shows why: ahead of the men in yellow, almost in the middle of the field, is a naked man. Now he’s on the center strip, the area of almost brown earth, and he’s jumping in the air, his penis bobbling. The camera immediately cuts away to the dark-skinned umpire, who is looking down at his watch.
    I stare hungrily, impatiently, because it was only a moment, two seconds of fame at most, that the camera granted the naked man, but it was enough. This isn’t a man at all. It’s Selwyn.
    I swallow hard. Relief—that he’s there, and visible. I get up from the bed and start dressing, hurriedly. The TV shows a gang of at least six yellow-jacketed men dragging Selwyn off the field.
    ‘Where are you going?’ asks the loss-adjuster.
    ‘Where,’ I ask him, ‘do they take him now, that man?’
    The loss-adjuster looks at me as if I’ve started speaking in Spanish. Which I do, sometimes, on occasions of high emotion, but not this time. I’m staying grounded, practical.
    When he realizes I’m waiting for an answer, he says he doesn’t know. ‘The Tower of London. The local police station.’
    ‘Do they go back and collect his clothes before they set off? Or does he have to go in the van naked?’
    ‘They’ll give him a blanket, I guess.’
    ‘A blanket ? Do police vans carry blankets, and duvets and pillow cases? Do they handcuff him?’
    ‘Why are you asking?’
    ‘Because that’s Selwyn!’ I’m angry not with him, but because I can’t find a shoe.
    ‘Oh,’ he says. ‘Oh. I don’t think so.’
    ‘You’ve never seen him.’ Not even a photograph. How can I have not shown him?
    ‘No, but it’s unlikely.’
    ‘When did unlikely stop something being true?’
    ‘When you’re tired. And worried.’
    ‘Wrong answer.’
    ‘That’s a common-or-garden streaker. They come from nowhere, they parade their dicks or their breasts to a national audience, they go on a couple of chat shows, they disappear. It’s a tradition.’
    I sit down on the bed, still one-shoed. At least, I think, Selwyn is safe, and in a particular place. They’re probably taking his fingerprints right now: those unique whorls, no one else’s in the universe. ‘You’re telling me,’ I say calmly—but clearly I am angry with him, the shoe is secondary—‘that a mother doesn’t know her own son?’
    ‘You are not his mother.’
    ‘I have seen that boy naked more times than any other person on this planet.’
    ‘Step-mother.’
    This hurts. ‘No. No and no and no. You think because I’m his step-mother I can’t know him better than his what, his biological mother? Love him better? Biology has nothing to do with this, it’s not even on the syllabus. If you think I’m deliberately trying to love him more precisely because I didn’t see him hauled out in a bloody bundle from between my legs—if you think I’m like those women in the City who whine that they have to work harder than the men just to stay equal, to prove