Page 31 of The Square

CHAPTER TEN - ALEC

“No,” I say, returning from outside.

“No what?” Eliza asks. I find her in the kitchen, which has clearly been renovated and made suitable for the twenty-first century. Or else the First Duke of Whatever the Fok who once lived here was very ahead of his time. She’s making a cup of tea, using the electric kettle. How very goddamn British of her.

“What you said. About the baby. No.”

She places down her mug and squares off to me. “Which part? Can you be specific? I’d like to know exactly which thing you think you’re giving me an ultimatum on, so that when I tell you to go fuck yourself, I can be precise.”

“You said that there’s no way you’ll let me raise it. No. If it’s my child, I will, by God, raise that kid in whatever way I see fit.”

She places her hands on the massive farmhouse table in front of her and leans forward. “Will you now?”

“You’d certainly better believe I fokken will.”

“Hm,” she says, turning to pour the water from the kettle over the tea leaves in her mug. The steam rises as she pours, like some kind of genie in ethereal form, come to spy on our conversation. She turns back, pulls out a chair from the table, and sits with her hands around the sides of the mug. It’s still drafty. While I was out, the rain started again. She’s put on an oversized sweater. The sleeves are too long for her arms and they cover her hands and almost all of her fingers. She looks like an urchin from Oliver Twist. Yet another case in which her Dickensian upbringing peers out from behind her crafted façade.

“Hm? Fok does that mean? Hm?”

“Nothing. Where did you go?

“When?”

“Just now.”

“Around. Down the lane. Why?”

“Did something happen?”

“What do you mean? Like what?”

“I don’t know. Like Saul becoming Paul on the road to Damascus.”

“Fok are those cunts?”

“Charming.” She blows on her tea and takes a sip. “I guess what I’m saying is that I’m surprised you feel so strongly about wanting the responsibility of caring for a child.”

“Why?”

“Because, my precious, you’re the most selfish person I’ve ever known.”

Sometimes I have to stop when Eliza talks to me like that. No one talks to me the way she does. Not even Christine or Danny ever talked to me the way Eliza does. But, for some reason, when she does it, it doesn’t really bother me. I do not welcome it, and if she didn’t, I’d be just as happy. But I don’t have a problem allowing it.

She’s never done it in front of anyone else. Nor would she, I don’t imagine. She knows that if she did, I’d have no choice to take action. Action that no one would be pleased about. And so, for some reason, we’ve fallen into a pattern where she gets to do it in private and I allow it. I think it’s the tacit agreement we have that lets her continue to know she’s special in my world.

I take off my newly rained-upon jacket and place it on the back of the chair across from her that I sit down in. “I’m going to tell you what will happen next.”

“Are you now?”

“Tomorrow, we’re going to leave this place and we’re going to Nara.”

“Are we then?” She takes another sip of her tea. I choose to ignore her annoying and rhetorical questions and I don’t say anything. After a moment, she asks, “Why Nara?”

“I have a house and no active concerns there at the moment. It’s safe and I can have medical staff on site.”

“Nara’s the place where they have the park with all the deer, yes?”

“Once we’re there—”