by Kate Hamer
‘Perhaps you’re right.’ I think of the glittering blood along the wall on the day of the murder. Now somehow, the way Phoebe has painted it, I can see the whole city running with red. ‘That murder …’
‘Stop it.’ She’s tapping her eyelids, over and over.
‘What’s the matter?’ I say.
‘Nothing. I can’t talk about that at the moment.’
‘Why?’
She holds onto my sleeve. ‘Not now. We’ll talk about it another time.’
‘It was gruesome.’
‘Shut up. Will you just fucking shut up about it.’ A couple walking past swing round at her shouting, scan us and move on.
Phoebe turns away from me, still tapping around the sockets of her eyes, then whirls back. Her face has changed, like she was doing something to it while I couldn’t see it. She’s smiling now. ‘D’you reckon it looks like women’s parts, the red hole in the ground where all the water gushes out?’ She barks out a laugh, then studies me for a response.
‘Fuck off,’ I say weakly.
‘Yes, yes. Can you imagine it? All those funny little Iron Age men scrabbling around worshipping like they told us. Worshipping the big hot hole. I can see it now.’
She’s watching me and I can’t help it; I feel the blood flooding into my face. She’s doing this deliberately. I think about looking away but something in me keeps me staring straight at her so it’s she that has to break the spell. ‘Look at you,’ she says, a slant of familiar affection in her voice. ‘Let’s get you away from all this. I’m going to take you for a big fat ice cream whatever you say.’ Then she heads off and I follow her like a lumbering cow.
In the café the light arcs in through the window. It touches her face, highlighting it. She counts out a pile of silver and coppers to pay for her ice cream.
‘You’ve spent all your money then?’ I can’t help it. I know I sound prudish and disapproving but I hate to think of whatever Paul has passed her. She seems too fragile for whatever it might be.
She makes a face. ‘I hardly ever have any money. Mum’s so tight, always has been. I got the shitty little jobs when I was a kid – like cleaning the whole bathroom and landing for twenty pence. When I stopped doing that she more or less stopped giving me anything. Dad does sometimes – he shoves it into my pocket when no one’s looking like he’s doing something wrong. That’s what I just spent.’
I look at Phoebe. She always seems so stylish, but for the first time I can see – see how her height, her good looks mean she can pull off a kind of deception. Shift slightly and you notice the worn hem on her skirt, the split where the plastic has begun to come away on her shoes that aren’t really Converses but some cheap approximation of them. I remember an old parka she wore for three years in a row. Maybe it’s not all lies about how her mum treats her. I’d always assumed her style was her charity-shop aesthetic, a way of showing how little she cared. I have a rush of feeling for her. For the real her – or the closest I get to it that she shows in little glints.
She carries on. ‘Dad’s made a mistake marrying her. I can see it in his eyes, but he thinks there’s nothing he can do about it.’ She scrapes her teeth on a frill of dry skin on her bottom lip, tearing it off in a strip before it disappears into her mouth.
‘Mum always lets me have what I want. I can give you some, if you like. She just says to me “take what you need”.’ I blush at the obvious warmth of my generosity.
‘Steal?’ It’s like she’s tasting the word in her mouth, seeing if she likes it.
‘Yes.’ I agree, though that’s not how I’d meant it. I’d thought give, not steal.
‘Maybe some time when I really need it,’ she says, like she’s the generous one. She lets ice cream drip from her spoon and she looks younger again. I reach over and free a curl that’s stuck to her cheek.
‘Don’t do that,’ she says. ‘I didn’t say you could do that this time.’
I sit back in my chair and fold my arms.
‘Come on, don’t be like that,’ she says. ‘I’m just not used to it yet. I know, it’s a nice day – let’s go to the Spinney.’
‘I suppose.’
She stands abruptly, nearly knocking over the glass ice-cream bowl. She looks excited now. ‘It’s ages since we’ve been there,’ she says.
*
We found the Spinney about nine years ago. That was the age where we were still playing hide-and-seek among the trees. Make-believe homes with leaves for plates. Strange mashes of river slime and flowers, ostensibly for making spells but really to enjoy the disgust of them, the wafts of stink they made. We’d vowed to keep the place a secret and as far as I knew all three of us – Phoebe, Grace and me – have stuck to that. We didn’t even know what a spinney was. I still haven’t bothered to find out, and who knows what ancient children’s book the word drifted out of and stuck. We still call it the Spinney. It’s so utterly quiet. The air is coloured green from being filtered through all the leaves. It’s hard to know why it’s even there: a stone wall cutting off the river from the rest of the field so there’s an isolated, tree-filled space between. Perhaps there were once suicidal sheep who chucked themselves in the water and drowned so the farmer built it to stop them. Whatever reason, the gap between the river and the wall is our Spinney.
We set off. It’s on the edge of Bath, in the countryside really. Even as the houses thin out to nothing, it’s still a long lane and two fields away. As we walk, Phoebe nips off the tops of cow parsley and flicks them into the river.
‘Remember the wishing bowl?’ she says, as she skips along. ‘Remember the stuff we made in there?’
‘I guess,’ I say, but of course I do.
The wishing bowl inside the Spinney is a deep pitted hole in a rock that sticks out into the river, curved at the end like a crochet hook. It’s imprinted on my brain. The filthy water bright with flower heads slopping over the side of the hole, berries pearling up to the surface. The rock wreathed in our chains of wild flowers and the nip of wild garlic in the air. The plump child that was me standing in a shaft of sunlight, diligently pumping away at it with a stubby branch as thick as a cudgel. ‘Please let Kirsty Rainworth’s hair fall out, please let my dad buy me a dog, please let Dad not have an accident on the oil rigs, please let Miss Cosgrove’s arms fall off …’ The industriousness I applied even to incantation and enchantment. That child sickens me. You always were a silly cow, I think.
‘We actually peed in it once because we said it would make the spell stronger. We really did. What horrible little girls we must’ve been.’ Phoebe throws back her head and laughs, and light catches on her teeth.
I make out I don’t remember because for some stupid reason it embarrasses me, but actually the memory is so clear I can nearly see it. It was a cold day and we all took turns. A plume of steam rose from the bowl like the bang and smoke of a real magic spell had flashed inside its crucible.
‘You know what you’d wish for.’ She glances at me slyly and sends another flower head soaring into the river.
I pretend to yawn. I need her to calm down right now. It’s frazzling me, her energy.
‘Come on. Name it. You know what you want.’
A horrible creeping sensation shoots up the back of my neck into my hair. She’s staring at me, pouting her lips out.
‘Leave it,’ I say. It comes out gruff and uncomfortable.
‘Yes, yes, you do.’ She cups her breasts with both hands, her thumb and finger angled as if about to tweak her nipples. ‘You want my body and everyone knows it.’
‘Fuck off,’ I say, aware of the hot gust of breath as I speak. ‘Just fuck off.’
I can feel dust sticking to my top lip.
She shivers her hands at me. ‘Please, bowl. Give Orla what she wants,’ she incants, in a stupid play-spell voice.
‘I mean it. Stop it.’
‘Calm down, it’s only a game.’
‘You always say that.’ I’m shouting now. She’s been cranking me up all day
and I’ve had enough. I feel like I’m going to explode.
‘Look at you, all red in the face. Really, calm down.’ Her eyes slant towards me, laughing.
We’ve both stopped walking now. Face each other. She’s taking something out on me that I don’t know about. The mystery of not knowing makes it worse, like I’m shut out and the door is bolted.
I feel huge beside her, like I could pick her up and toss her in the air, like I’m a giant and she’s a tiny doll.
‘You’d better stop winding me up like this,’ I yell. ‘It’s not fair.’
She turns away, rolling one shoulder. ‘You can be such a child sometimes, just look at yourself,’ she says softly. ‘Just go and look at yourself now and see what you see.’
And I do. It comes to me in broken pictures. The plump arm of a child pounding at the wishing bowl. A great red open gob of want. Dust and sweat. Fat little legs going back and forth to school.
She is so light, Phoebe. I can almost imagine she’s a bird when I shove her. I barely know I’m doing it until I feel her thin bones beneath my hands and the surge of energy that goes through me. Just one hard shove and she seems to take flight, and for a second I blink, looking up for her, hollow-boned and laughing, swooping against the blue sky and brimming with the joy at the novelty.
But then I hear the frantic splashing. I edge forward to where there’s a disturbed dent in the tall grasses and cow parsley that fringe the riverbank and peer over.
‘No,’ I breathe. ‘No, no, no.’
The water bulges, shatters into broken light as Phoebe rises and falls and flails as the water crashes around her. Her hair flattens into a black skull and a thick snake of it winds itself into her mouth and I stand frozen, watching her.
‘Bitch. Bitch,’ she splutters, then shoots backwards, slipping on slimy rocks beneath. I never knew it was so deep.
‘Phoebe,’ I cry out.
I can’t come to you, I think, my mind tangling. You’ll pull me under and hold me there until I choke on blackness. She rears up again and the look on her face is like an animal trying to save itself. She gulps and water spumes out of her mouth.
‘Phoebe, I’m so, so sorry,’ I call over as she manages to stand with water eddying round her thighs, steadying herself.
‘How could you? How could you do that, you bitch? I hate you now.’ She wades over to the bank towards me and I can barely breathe because the look of her is like a monster dripping from the river, water falling from the ledges of her, not my beautiful Phoebe at all. The shock and fear have changed her into something else and she’s turned ugly as sin. It’s the animal fighting for survival, the one that would do anything, showing through her beauty. It’s so distorted the sight of it shocks me to the core, but I know because it’s Phoebe that at some point I’ll tell myself it wasn’t like that at all. That whatever I’ve seen has just been a trick of the light, the shock addling my brain, the day turning in on itself.
6
Grace
Get up, bitch, I tell myself.
Sometimes I wonder why I talk to myself like this, insult myself in this way. Though absolutely I do know really. It forces me to calm right down. It keeps me in line and doing what I need to do.
I roll out of bed, coughing into the pillow. How long is it since I’ve remembered to change my bedding? It has a fusty scent. Later perhaps. Time falls through my hands with everything that must be done and before I know it, it’s night again and it takes just about all I’ve got to flop into bed.
Usually I have a few moments for myself in the still heat of the morning. The central heating has clicked on while we were both asleep and its heavy warmth lies over everything. Mum feels the cold even in the summer. I’ll wander through the flat or I might even smoke half a joint on the balcony outside.
It usually calms me, this interlude. But this morning I’m agitated. Daniel texted me, Hey love, how you doing? Be nice to cu soon sometime. So I texted him back. Not today fraid. Now I’m agonising if it sounded so curt he’ll finally have had enough of me. I think about sending another text but it’ll probably make things worse. He knows the situation I’m in so he should really leave it to me to say when I can be free or not, and today is check-up day for Mum so I need to put the whole thing out of my mind.
I walk through the flat, wiping sleep from my eyes and noticing everything that’s wrong. There’s an off feeling about it all, as if it’s conspiring against me. I notice every grimy corner. Every cobweb dancing in the breeze. The cooker with its dull glaze of grease on top. The corners of the bath where dark grime has accumulated. Red blooms around the base of the taps there. It’s some kind of bacteria, I know.
This weekend I’ll get up early and blitz the place. I’ll buy a bucketful of cleaning products and I’ll spend the whole day scrubbing, chasing every grain of dirt and capturing it between shiny bubbles and washing it down the drain. Every scabby corner. Every silted-up cupboard where pipes drip and coagulate crusty stuff around their joints. The dried-up insects that tick their way up to the tenth floor and squeeze through gaps that aren’t really gaps only to curl up and die by the painted skirting. Not until then will I feel calm and free.
I start to breathe easier and the feeling of doom blows off me like a hat. I feel sparked with energy. The cleaning vision gleams bright like some beautiful shining temple on a hill. Because it’s in the future, I can hold its gleam in the palm of my hand and keep it balanced there, before it has time to sink into my bones and weigh me down.
‘Mum,’ I call, skittering down the hallway, my socked feet sliding on the bare boards. ‘Mum, wake up. It’s check-up day. You’re going out!’
I crack eggs into the frying pan while she sits at the table.
‘You didn’t have to take me, chicken,’ she says, using my old name. I refuse to let it close my throat up and give in to sentiment. I absolutely refuse.
‘Of course I do. How else would it happen? Who else would do it?’ I crack a line in another egg and split it with both thumbs into the pan. ‘Who else that bothers about anything anyway. Besides, I’ve already told school I won’t be in because of it.’ I wipe the slime off each thumb on the back pockets of my jeans.
She could have gone on her own with the duty ambulance.
‘Shall we arrange to have her picked up at seven?’ the woman asked on the phone.
The duty ambulance fulfils all the appointments by picking them up one by one so the journey is a snail trail around Bath that can last for hours. There’s the afflicted whose wheelchairs are strapped either side so they don’t go careering around like loose roller skates inside: they are variously pale, drooling, gagging, some with heads bent over so far they nearly touch their knees. The journey goes on for so long Mum gets sick. She has to get up at the crack of dawn and there’s no time for her to come to slowly like she needs.
‘Well?’ The woman was tapping at the other end of the phone. Computer keys maybe. Or perhaps her pen on the edge of her desk.
I closed my lips in a tight seam. No, damn you. Fuck you. If I have to load my mother up in a wheelbarrow and cart her down to the hospital myself, I’ll do it. You counter of sick bodies. You bright-sounding lame bitch.
I undid the seam of my lips to draw in a deep breath.
‘Thank you, it’s fine. I’ll make my own arrangements. I’ll take a day off and cancel the carers for that day and I’ll bring her there myself.’
The tapping stopped. ‘Righto then.’ A trill on the phone like she’d turned into a bird and then a click.
Now I walk through the flat, flicking cushions back into place while we wait for the taxi. Outside the living room window, beyond the balcony, the sky is high and pale blue. It stretches over this doll-sized city, right across to the hills beyond, where black-and-white cows move slowly in their green squares. The balcony is my personal place, my solace. It’s where I can allow myself to be stirred by the world. Where I can watch the moon nailed like a bright disc to the sky. Where the sun’s rise at daw
n leaves bloody tracks, and when it sets I watch as the lights below open up the darkness once again. Where I can give myself permission to dream about the future and about Daniel. I can let myself be filled up by all these things – out there, in private. I can get wildness out of my system.
I wait for the toot of the taxi. I’m alert for it, and when it comes the sound rises sharply up to me through the open windows of the balcony like it’s a ball being thrown up in the air. The lift has been mended so we take it down to the ground floor and I use my foot as a doorstop while I manoeuvre Mum out of the main doors. She squints up at the sky and I try to remember when she was last outside. Actually, I remember, it wasn’t too long ago: we went out with Rosa and Averill last week. But all the same she looks fearful this time, like she’s getting out of the habit of going out. The taxi smells of chocolate inside and as we drive away I can hear kids playing in the tiny playground, its margins wreathed with toothy dandelion leaves. We slide past it, past the few mothers numb with fatigue watching their children leap and bend until it’s time for school.
At the hospital we wait lined up. A woman in blue cotton trousers and matching top approaches with a clipboard. The trousers show up the width of her thighs that look out of proportion to the rest of her.
‘I’m Maya. I’m the clinic co-ordinator.’
We both nod dutifully and Mum smiles widely at her, and only I know the effort it takes her to do this. The stress of these appointments weighs badly on her.
‘You can have your chat to the social worker before Mum goes in.’
I’m instantly and completely on high alert, though no one looking at me would be able to tell a thing, I’m sure.
‘I haven’t got a chat with the social worker.’
The clinic co-ordinator leans back as if to let her torso take a few minutes’ rest on those thick legs – legs that would see her through anything. ‘Yes. Yes, it’s down here. Miss Kinsella, she’s called. New. Do you want me to take you through?’