How It Was

by Janet Ellis

  Beneath the thrum of the machine, inside his head, Michael listened again to the rhythmic sound of Sarah’s young hands, meeting in a swiping clap then slapping one after the other on to her thighs, as she mimicked a horse’s accelerating canter. Clap-ker-thunk. Clap-ker-thunk. Day after day, she guided an invisible mount over imaginary jumps or along unseen paths. Clap-ker-thunk as she sat at the dining table or in the back of the car. Clap-ker-thunk as she watched television or hesitated over her homework. She clicked her tongue against her teeth to urge speed and snorted through her lips in horsey reply. Michael closed his eyes and rode with her, gently, safely, over a sunny field under a never darkening sky.

  Chapter 7

  22 September

  My nails almost reach the tips of my fingers. MUST stop biting the skin on my thumb. Got twelve out of twenty in the French test today, but Madame P said she’d sprung it on us so she didn’t expect full marks.

  I don’t regret giving the farm set to Eddie because it looks babyish now and I can’t remember ever wanting to play with it. He’ll keep wondering if I’ll change my mind and I won’t let him off worrying. I have such power over him. Even if he’s happy to start with, I can make him cry in seconds. If he’s cross, I can make him laugh. Sometimes I get hold of his mouth and twist his lips up and down, making him look as if he’s smiling or miserable, but I don’t really have to touch him to do it. One time I was on my own with him, when he was about one and a bit. I wanted him to go to sleep. I put him in his cot and whenever he wiggled or tried to get up, I pushed my hand flat on his back. After a while, he sagged and closed his eyes. When he woke up, the first thing he did was call out for me.

  The other day he was looking at his comic. A big splodgy tear fell on to the page. I asked him what the matter was and that made him cry more. I told him to stop before he made papier mâché which made him sort of laugh. He said the worst thing had happened to him in school and he didn’t want to go back the next day. I said what and he said a boy in his class took his pencil case and ran off with it. I said that’s not awful and he said it was because he tried not to cry but he couldn’t help it and you should never cry in front of the other boys because they go on and on about cry baby and do you want your mummy and stuff like that. I put my arms round him. I smelled the sour waxiness of his hair and felt his woolly jumper warm up under my hands. I said they can’t hurt you and they’ll have forgotten all about it tomorrow. But I won’t forget, Eddie, I said. I’ll keep you safe. I meant it.

  Chapter 8

  ‘How’s he doing?’ the nurse says. She bristles with purpose. I suspect that she is different in the outside world. Timid, probably. Her uniform imbues her with confidence. It fits her tightly with no room to spare.

  ‘Can you ask him how he is, please?’ I say. ‘Can he have the mask off, just for a moment?’

  She raises and lowers her shoulders in an elaborate gesture of indecision. Michael’s eyes are fixed on her, our Empress. Thumbs up or thumbs down, she will decide. ‘Come on then,’ she says. She lifts his head and undoes the strap.

  He groans. The least movement disturbs him and this hurts, too. He relaxes against her hands as she eases him against the pillow.

  She settles him and strokes the engorged skin of his cheeks, crooning as if they were alone. ‘All right?’ she says.

  He mutters something but his mouth is dry, and the words don’t form properly.

  The nurse holds a beaker to his lips. She lifts both his legs together to straighten the sheet. It’s no effort for her, Michael is as light as tissue paper now. He scarcely marks the bedding he lies on. He was always so solid before. He stayed upright, even when I pushed and then pushed harder to try to topple him. She picks up something from the floor. A card, drawn by a child. Happy Mother’s Day with all the letters in different colours. She frowns. It’s the wrong time of year.

  ‘It’s an old one,’ I say. I open it before I put it back in the bag it escaped from. From yor son, it says. A large number of crosses start from under Eddie’s name and continue to the edge of the page, as if he’d carried on writing them into the air.

  ‘Excuse me,’ the nurse says, squeezing past me.

  ‘Sorry,’ I say, resenting having to move. I begrudge her presence, her better knowledge of Michael’s condition and her questions. When did he last go to the toilet, or have a headache, or cough? Not to know is to be negligent and uncaring. The nurse is passing me again, she looks puzzled at my not waiting, with my knees to one side, for her to make her way back round to the other side of the bed. ‘Miles away,’ I say.

  In truth, I am decades away, watching myself buttoning up a fawn coat, with the dangling button I never remembered to sew on until I wore it, and fastening a paisley scarf round my neck. I am back over thirty years ago.

  I had my shopping list shoved into my coat pocket. There were only four items on it, but I liked to write things down before I set out. It made me feel efficient, at least for a while.

  The greengrocer said, ‘Shepherd’s pie? Nice big portions!’ and winked, heaving the potatoes into my bag along with large clods of earth.

  I blushed as my hands shook with the growing weight; there seemed to be a great many to the pound. He winked again. He saw the colour rise in my cheeks and kept his eyes on me as he took my money, rummaging for a long time in the front pocket of his apron for the change. I was almost tempted to ask for something else, so that he could see my face return to its normal colour, as it surely, eventually, must, but he had turned away and was already fondling a cucumber for the woman behind me.

  I had to steel myself to go into the baker’s, too. Five months earlier, I’d bought a fruit cake covered with stiff white icing and asked the woman behind the counter to write ‘Happy Anniversary’ on it, so that I could surprise Michael. ‘You’re not a baker yourself, then?’ she had said, raising her eyebrows as she’d noted the words on her little pad. ‘It’s normally only wedding cakes with messages I get asked for. Couldn’t you rustle up even a coffee and walnut sponge for your hubby?’ She looked up from arranging iced buns in a tower as I walked in. ‘Ah, hello,’ she said. ‘Here comes the unbaking sinner of the parish.’

  It was as I walked towards the church that I thought I saw Philip. The man wore a jacket like his; his hair was unruly and twisted, just as Philip’s was when he pulled at it with both hands and it stayed upright on its own afterwards. While he was thinking. Or talking to me. Before he kissed me. This man was at quite a distance and facing away. I couldn’t see him clearly, but I knew that it wasn’t Philip. He would be in the classroom at this time of day, for a start, and not walking slowly down this village street in my part of Kent. And of course, it couldn’t be him, because Philip was dead. He had been dead for eight years.

  I wanted to sit down. I wished I could just sink to the ground where I was, drop my head to my chest and close my eyes. I didn’t think I could make it home upright. If I tried, I thought I’d end up shuffling, martyred, on my knees for the last few steps. The man who wasn’t Philip was so utterly not him by the time he was level with me that I wanted to laugh. My bag thumped against my shin at every other step, like a penance.

  The recreation ground was an open patch of scrub. The grass was marked with white lines, faded to a line of dots after a summer of use. The goalposts sagged where they had struggled with the weight of dangling boys, testing their muscles and making their palms red with effort. The playground apparatus huddled in a corner. Underneath each swing was an aggressive swipe of dirt that puddled at even the lightest shower. The base of the slides was dark with dried mud, too. There was a shelter where mothers grouped by day as their children swung and slid. Their teeth were clenched against a permanently chilly wind that the three sides of the structure only seemed to invite in. At dusk, there would be a brief colonisation by the nearly-grown-up local kids, anxious to be elsewhere and making do with writing graffiti on the flimsy walls, sucking cigarette smoke into their cheeks and ignoring the playthings.


  There was nobody there now. A woman with a child in a pushchair left as I approached; she looked relieved that she had served her time. I sat on the sloping slats of the bench.

  I remembered Philip beside me, in the pub after the first rehearsal, sitting so close that his thigh pushed against mine. I’d looked up at him quickly; he was talking to the woman across the table. He appeared preoccupied, but when I shifted my weight away, he’d moved again, renewing that pressure, his touch.

  Was that the actual beginning? Don’t things truly start long before you know they’ve begun? Philip and I had the kind of accidental meeting that some people would celebrate. Everything had conspired to make it happen, too. ‘Yes, why don’t you join the choir?’ Michael had said, when our neighbour had tried to recruit me. ‘Marion loves singing, it sounds fun,’ he’d said, encouraging, kind.

  The neighbour had beamed. ‘Your husband’s right,’ she’d said, ‘it’s great fun. Nobody’s really a singer,’ she’d said, using the very phrase that could have condemned her.

  What would be the point of going to that? I’d thought, singing with people who don’t take it seriously, who’d turn the pages of their sheet music too slowly to catch the notes.

  She’d turned to Michael. ‘We have a little concert at the end of every term,’ she’d said. ‘So you’d be able to see what we’ve been up to.’

  ‘I think you should go,’ Michael said later. ‘I can look after Sarah.’

  The church hall was brightly lit with a fierce overhead glare. It illuminated the thick runnels of carelessly applied paint on the walls and there were no shadows to hide the scuffed chairs and peeling posters. People greeted each other with exclamatory glee. A woman in a tight orange coat made her way over as if she’d been specifically told to watch out for me. ‘Subs!’ she said in a bright, loud way. She held out an empty Farley’s Rusks tin that rattled heavily with coppers. When she met my eye, she inhaled quickly. ‘Oh, are you new?’ she said. ‘It’s thruppence for tea and . . .’ She waved at a table behind us. There was a knot of people around the choirmaster.

  He was an earnest young man, who looked to be in his late twenties. He peered over his glasses at me as though I were much younger than him, which I clearly wasn’t. ‘We have a mixed repertoire,’ he said. ‘Some meaty choral pieces and a few popular tunes for light relief. We don’t audition. Just decide on your range and off you go.’

  The neighbour was nowhere to be seen. I went and stood beside a woman who settled herself into position like a large cat, her hands over her chest. She smelled of Vicks rub. I cursed myself for being persuaded to come, embarrassed for them all. I would feign illness, I decided, either my own or somebody else’s, so that I could leave at the tea break. We worked through ‘Rustic Song’. It was a laborious process; the pianist had to return to the same phrase again and again and everyone laughed at the mistakes.

  Afterwards, they fell on the cups of tea and biscuits as though they were enormous treats. I looked for a way to leave without being seen. Philip came and stood in front of me. He wore a long black coat, unbuttoned to reveal a torn lining. There was a dab of yellow paint on his shirt and deep indentations on his belt. It had obviously been fastened more tightly as he’d grown thinner. I stared at him like a doctor examining a patient, half taking in what he said while listening for signs and clues to the real story. I can’t quite see his face now. I remember the sensation of being with him, a delicious roiling and churning like being on a rollercoaster. A gulp of pleasure, the way illicit laughter catches in your throat as you stifle it. When he spoke, I knew his voice would become familiar to me. Someone brushed past him, and he turned away and raised his hands to his head and clutched his hair. I knew I’d see him do that again. I would touch the small wound where his razor had nicked his cheek and stroke the faint, black stubble on his jaw. He’d asked me about how I came to be there and who else I knew, while I learned the colour of his eyes and his high cheekbones and his wayward hair. Underneath his questions and my answers ran a steady, ostinato beat of desire.

  He’d kissed me as we walked to his car. In the pub, he’d offered me a lift home. It was on his way, he said. He didn’t wait to hear where I lived. He’d spun me to face him and kissed me. The collar of my coat lifted and pressed hard into my cheek, but I didn’t want to move. He raised my hands and held them against his, palm to palm, all the fingers aligned. We’d left the next rehearsal early the next week, separately, trying not to laugh as we met in the car park. How on earth had we even planned that, let alone carried it through? It was such a risky thing to do.

  It was just as perilous to go to his little flat, practically inviting the neighbours to spy on us as we left his car, a low-down frog-eyed Sprite I’d struggled to get out of and whose doors closed with loud, announcing clunks. He had two rooms on the first floor. Even though I’d never been there before, I could tell he’d straightened the eiderdown with extra vigour and put his clothes away. A pile of saucepans teetered on the draining board, still dripping. When I sat on his bed, a single, rolled sock sprang from underneath the pillow. He’d stopped my laughing by kissing my neck, my cheek, my mouth. He’d said he should put a record on, but I’d held him tightly because I couldn’t bear him to take his mouth away from mine. We’d separated only for the time it took to remove clothing and made love so quickly that I’d felt embarrassed afterwards, like someone who has eaten too many bread rolls before discovering the rest of the banquet. The next time, the second time, that same evening, we’d stopped sometimes to look at each other, or touch somewhere, or say something.

  I’d stroked the white weals that crossed his wrists, as if I were learning their configuration. I’d felt as if the rest of his life were an exam I didn’t have time to prepare for. It would be useful, though, in the coming weeks, to remember where to put my cup to conceal the cigarette burn in the embroidered Indian cover on the table and the way to wrestle open the window catch, to take the milk bottle from the sill outside. I can recall the room quite clearly. The pictures he’d stuck on the walls were facsimiles of paintings on pages he’d cut from books. Sellotape glistened at their corners. If he’d wanted to, he could have removed every trace of himself from the room in seconds.

  A few weeks later, Sarah fell ill with a heavy cold and fever. I’d defied Michael’s worry about her rising temperature and insisted on going out. ‘You’ll only miss one week’s rehearsal if you don’t go,’ Michael had said. I’d had to prise Sarah’s fingers from me and ease myself away from that hot little head.

  ‘Once she’s asleep,’ I’d said, ‘when I’ve gone, she’ll be fine.’ I’d slipped away without thinking about either of them any more. Coming home, I’d set my life with them in motion again with the turn of my key in the lock, as if nothing had happened while I’d been gone.

  Seven. That’s all. That’s the measurable total of our times together. Philip had looked at me the way small children or dogs do, with a clear, untroubled gaze. When we’d made love for the first time, I didn’t even think I was being unfaithful. Being in bed with Michael had always left me feeling as if I were the runner in the relay team that never carried the baton over the line. I hadn’t known that you could learn to make love. But I never took my lessons home. I lay beneath Michael as I always did. In my mind, I only betrayed myself.

  I never once told him I loved him. Love was a ball he threw to me but I didn’t catch it. I didn’t try. At school, we’d all believed in love at first sight. We half expected a physical manifestation when it happened. Perhaps we’d be covered with stigmata or develop a huge, white-headed spot. Everything else showed on our bodies and our skin, after all. Falling in love, we speculated, must be something both pleasurable and painful, like getting into a too-hot bath. We knew about lust, of course, and practised intense looks on the hapless boy who collected our plates after school dinner. Phoebe had even written ‘I Love You’ in brown sauce, which he’d blushed to see.

  When Michael had visited me after Sarah’s birth, fr
esh from having had his daughter pointed out to him through the nursery window, one swaddled infant among many, he’d looked at me with admiration and not a little nervousness. It was as if producing a baby both elevated and enhanced me. I’d enjoyed the sensation. I’d allowed myself to think that what I felt in return – a sort of protective pride and an urge to pat him on the head and tell him that he was clever, too – was love.

  Philip had a picture of Jeanne Hébuterne, one ear poking through the thick ropes of her hair, stuck to the wall. ‘You can tell Modigliani loved the sheen of her,’ he said, ‘and adored that wayward strand of hair on her left cheek. The day after he died, she jumped to her death with their nearly-born child inside her. Such intense, consuming love,’ said Philip.

  I thought she was cruel and selfish. She would have ignored the baby’s movements as she climbed the five flights of stairs for the last time. She and the baby would have tumbled together as they fell, neither concerned about knowing which way up the world was.

  ‘I love you more than that,’ Philip said. I only kissed him in return. He’d leapt on to his sudden plans for our running away together like someone clinging to a raft in rapids. Sarah, I said. I can’t leave Sarah. He said that she’d soon adjust to my absence. I was at boarding school when I was her age, he said, and I didn’t really care if I saw my mother or not. The boys I teach don’t give their parents a second thought, either, I’m sure of it. We would send Sarah postcards and letters from wherever we landed, he’d said. She’ll have her constant, glamorous reminders of you, my darling, until she’s old enough to set sail herself and join us. Her friends will envy her, he’d said.