THINGS WHICH ARE NOT

      ‘Decisions? Don’t look at me.’

      But this is exactly what he does: he stops sawing through the thin copper pipe as I reach the top stair, he turns around and looks. And when he has looked for several seconds, he says, ‘You’re so pale, you know, Sadie.’

      Jason’s own hair and eyes are the colour of charcoal, perhaps a touch warmer, closer to burned wood, scorches on wood.

      ‘Yes, thanks, I do know.’

      My pallor is more than compensated for by hair the colour of pomegranate pulp. I am a lucky redhead, if that is not a contradiction in terms: none of the legendary temper, no incendiary freckles, and my skin lacks that blue tint of exposed bone. Philip says that my skin is the colour of Chardonnay; but he is kind, he is my husband. He says that I caramelise to muscat whenever I catch the sun.

      Jason says, ‘But because you’re pale, you’ll always look young. Younger than me, anyway.’

      ‘I am younger than you.’

      He is thirty-five, I am thirty-one. Earlier in our lives, when we had had fewer years, four of them would have made the difference of a generation: he would have been playing rugby on Saturday mornings when I was playing with my dolls; he would have been into punk when I was impressed by Genesis; smoking dope when I was sipping Pernod-and-black. Nowadays, four years is no time at all, but our lives are incomparable for other reasons. He is a father of four, the eldest of whom is fifteen.

      ‘Decision number one: I want to know where you’d prefer me to run this pipe. You have two options: beneath these floorboards here, or …’ he swivels, to point, ‘along this wall, which is less pretty but less work for me, less of a bill for you.’

      I sit down on the top stair. ‘Give me a moment.’

      He resumes his sawing: a sound effect for a music hall magician. ‘Enjoy your walk?’

      Hal’s walk. Before Hal came, four months ago, I rarely walked as far as the local shops. When I agreed to take him on, I read in a book that a Labrador should have an hour each day off the lead. And I do everything by the book. He lives for his trips to the park, which seems very little to ask. So I take him twice each day. Between these excursions, he dozes on his bed, slumped or curled but somehow tuned in for the sound of my arm slithering into a sleeve or for the change in tempo of my movements that implies that I am going to leave the house. Sometimes he knows before I do that I am thinking of leaving. I have had to become careful, self-conscious of my signals, because I hate to turn him down, to have to watch the droop of his ears, those blond velvet triangles. Whenever I do leave the house without him, his stare – sideways, heavily-lidded – seems to accuse me of going alone to the park.

      During our walk this morning, the clear sky was punctured by a knuckle of half-moon. Leaf-laden trees made a foreshortened horizon of green thunderclouds. The hedgerows were scattered with convolvulus flowers like washed but un-ironed hankerchiefs. Hal and I encountered other regulars. Firstly, the childminders: a bespectacled, tattooed man and a hennaed woman with their two battalions. Childminders, surely, because the children are too numerous, too similarly-aged and dissimilarly dressed to be their own. Four toddlers were strapped into two double buggies. Others were on foot, on small and unsteady feet, taking small and sometimes reluctant, even petulant, steps.

      Further on, I exchanged nods and smiles with the polite middle-aged couple as he, with her support, was venturing from his wheelchair; he managed a little more than last week. Then we passed the elderly, hobbling man and woman, both of them as arthritic as their dogs, her Alsatian and his dachshund. We were passed in turn by the cheerful, late-thirties mum who strides behind her baby’s plush pushchair and kicks a tennis ball ahead for her puppy to chase. We avoided the wrinkled but elaborately made-up woman who throws a small plastic naked doll for her miniature dog to fetch. Today, there were irregulars too: one of the benches was occupied by a canoodling couple of kids with masses of matted hair and layers of army surplus clothing. They were sharing a bottle of vodka for their elevenses. As Hal neared, they bellowed to their dog to ‘Play nicely’.

      None of them will be there