by Kate Hamer
She is bereft. Her eyes have been moist for nearly two whole days now. Her mouth downturned. Sometimes, she looks so sad the hardness in my stomach dissolves and I long to make her better. I feel about eight years old again, looking up into her face and thinking what I can do to make her smile, or to gain a glorious flicker of attention. Then it passes.
At first I felt relief that term had ended. Groups of girls or boys in packs unnerve me. I had plenty to look forward to. While she was distracted by The Beloved I would lounge in my pyjamas. I would take a fat book off to my room – like a cat dragging a dead bird – and feast on it until my eyes were blurry and the light was beginning to fade. I even felt I might become interested in real food once more and make myself something spare and light, delicious in its coolness and simplicity. While the house was empty, Dad at work and the others on some excursion, I would run baths and scent them with the gorgeous bath fragrance that Bertha gave me, Quelques Fleurs, for doing well in exams. She handed the parcel over to me with the solemnity of a religious ceremony, informing me at the same time that the fragrance was made up of over three hundred different floral essences. I eke it out and leave the cask in plain sight, standing guard over my diary. Every day I come home and expect it to have vanished. The mobile phone I had from Mr Jonasson is yet to ping, and although still pleasurable to think of and have because it was something meant just for me, the thought of it was fading in comparison to all these solitary delights. I really started to feel I liked the idea of an affair more than the reality. Healing, I felt, was just around the corner.
All these fantasies were swept away by The Beloved going. Now, once again I am picked over, watched and meddled with. The mobile phone has again become my one interest and focus. Did I really want him so badly? I do now. I keep the phone jammed up behind the ivy that grabs onto the back wall in the back garden. When I was younger I used to think the ivy looked like a determined child clambering over the wall. I used to have all sorts of ideas like that, but no more. I don’t know why. It’s like there’s no room for whims and fanciful imaginings such as those while my mind is taken up by so much bigger and more dangerous things.
It’s a risky mission but four or five times a day I go and check the phone, occasionally bringing it to the house to feed it with electricity. So far the screen has remained resolutely blank. It only occurred to me later on the day he gave it to me that he had my number but I don’t know his.
So that’s all that’s left to me, the hahahahaha delight in someone else’s displeasure and an empty phone. Both our summer dreams have rattled down into a few disappointing coins at the bottom of the tin. We weave around each other, baring teeth. Her part-time job seems more unpredictable than ever so I never know when she’s going to pop up. It means I am constantly on my guard and can’t get on with anything.
She brushes her short hair as she paces the kitchen so little strands drop all around her onto the floor and the kitchen counters. The brush makes a scraping sound on her wiry grey hair. There’s something on her mind. I sip my tea fast even though it’s hot and scalding. Finally she comes to a stop in front of me.
‘What’s so funny?’
‘What d’you mean?’
‘Your diary was open when I went into your room to dust this morning.’
Lie. Lie. Lie. Lie.
The hairs stand up on the back of my neck. My hands are shaking on my mug. I know I closed it. I put the hair across the page perfectly. Today’s entry read simply: ‘Hahahahaha.’
I also know there is no point contradicting her. I breathe slowly in and out. What’s she up to, bringing down our fourth wall?
‘Something seems to have tickled you pink.’
‘Not really.’
‘Something must’ve.’
She’s angry, I realise in a rush. We are so in tune she knows what I was laughing at. Laughing at her and her misery. She’s so furious now she can’t hold back from saying anything.
‘Maybe I was thinking of a joke. I can’t remember now.’
Her eyes slit towards me.
While she’s on the computer in the study next to the kitchen I slip outside. I’m beginning to lose faith in the phone and its blank screen but I’m so rattled it’s sent me scurrying for it. I put my hand up beneath the ivy and feel about, then once I’ve grasped it I hide behind the plants to look. There’s a little envelope in the window. I squeeze myself flat against the wall and open it.
Can’t stop thinking about you, the text reads. He signs it off with his first name, Lucas, and the intimacy of that plunges me into a warm bath of pleasure. I lean against the wall, embraced by ivy, and allow myself ten glorious minutes wallowing in Lucas.
With shaking fingers I text back, Me neither x.
I cage the phone again in the tangle of ivy branches, but as I’m walking away I hear the text button ping. I hadn’t thought to turn that off. That was dangerous. I switch off the volume, then look again.
Meet me tonight? it says.
I send mine winging back. Of course. I know a place where no one goes. I’ll show it to you. I’ll wait at the bottom of your street at 7?
I don’t know how I’ll get away but I’ll have to think of something. I look up at the back of the house. The long narrow sash windows remind me of eyes. Any minute I expect one to lower in a sudden blink. I shudder.
The garden looks dry and dusty today. I struggle to remember spending time in it when I was little. Were there ball games, den building, impromptu picnics? The refreshing slap of water on the legs from a hosepipe on a hot day? I can’t remember anything like that. Perhaps I’ve just forgotten about them. My mind is so unreliable sometimes. I don’t trust it. No, it’s always been a desolate space out here, I’m sure – little used. The presence of swings or paddling pools in other people’s gardens always surprised me, their blown-up, plastic multicoloured shapes incongruous against the grass.
I squint up at the windows again and wonder how long I can wait around for his reply before suspicions are raised. It’s never been a place I’ve spent time in so it will look odd. I wonder about keeping the phone in my room and quickly discount the idea. I check the phone again and it’s blank. I realise, like me, he must have to find a secret time and space to text. I like the idea. It makes me feel a lovely private bond with him that’s delicious. After ten minutes’ waiting I’m nearly giving up and thinking I’ll have to get back inside when the reply comes in the form of a single X.
Back inside she’s still on the computer and I try not to let any excitement show on my face, though I’m paranoid my cheeks are flushed. I worry that she’s looked out into the back garden and seen me but she shows no signs of it. Instead she sniffs. ‘We have the dentist today,’ she says.
‘Have we?’
‘Yes. I told you.’
She didn’t but I’m used to this. I no longer query it. These days I simply agree.
‘What time is the appointment?’
‘Two o’clock. What’s the matter? You look like your cat’s just gone missing. Have you got anything better to do?’
It’s OK because I’ll be back in time to meet Lucas, but the dentist means a ride in the car with her, not something I look forward to. No, that’s an understatement. Something I dread.
‘No, I haven’t got anything better to do.’
She nods. ‘You need to be ready in an hour.’
*
The air in the car is fraught with meaning. The way her bracelets jangle sets me on edge every time she changes gear. The stuff she used to clean the leather interior inflames my throat into a spasm, a sickness. We take the Bristol road and Bath thins out and disappears. Why we have to travel so far to the dentist I don’t know. Yes, I do. Everything like that – clothes, husbands, dentists, electricians, watch repairers – have to be some sort of ‘find’, a gem to be gloated over. I sink down into the seat, wanting to disappear.
‘Sit up straight.’
‘OK.’
We drive further, green and b
rown countryside blurring through the window. I study her out of the corner of my eye and a part of my heart caves in. The grooves below her eyes look a little more crinkled than yesterday. Unhappiness has aged her overnight. Suddenly, I’m hot with the idea of making her happy. It floods me. It’s a regressive position, I know that, the child in me, but when it arises I never seem able to resist arcing upwards and trying to grab onto the bait.
‘Mum?’
‘Mmmm?’ Her rings click against the wheel as she steers.
‘Shall we do something this summer?’
‘Like what?’
‘Well, what were you planning to do with Verity?’
She’s silent for a very long time. The silence makes the car feel as if all the air has been sucked out of it. I crack the window down a tiny bit.
‘I hadn’t made any plans with Verity,’ she hisses. ‘We didn’t have time before she went. Why, what is it you want to do?’
‘Nothing, I just thought—’
‘You’re glad she’s gone. You should have tried harder with her. You’ve driven her away.’
‘No, no. I do try sometimes.’ I can feel silly baby tears welling up behind my eyes and threatening to spill. ‘I do try but she doesn’t seem to want me to.’ There’s a squeak in my voice because my throat has closed up so much.
‘Maybe’, her hands have crossed each other to steer, ‘that’s because she doesn’t find you particularly fascinating.’
A tide of misery bows my head down and I look at my fingers plaiting with each other. I pick hard at a tiny spot on my wrist bone, pinching as hard as possible between fingernails. I try to offset it by thinking about meeting Lucas tonight but somehow that all seems difficult and remote now.
‘For God’s sake, buck up,’ she says. ‘I can’t stand it when you sink down like that, like you want to wallow in a pit of despair. It’s so depressing.’ We slow to a stop at a junction and she sighs deeply, which tells me she has come completely to the end of her tether with me. ‘I can’t see properly this side with those low branches blocking the view,’ she says. ‘Tell me if we’re clear to go.’
I crane my neck and see the four-by-four barrelling towards us.
‘Yes,’ I say. ‘Drive.’
The trees all clap their leaves together like they’re an audience applauding and I feel the roots beneath us and how they weave into each other and make a basket to hold us, and the insects whizz in and out of the bark, flashing their iridescent colours, and the bacteria in the soil moves it about. And I can see the movement, in fast frame – on some kind of loop of a film that’s spooling through me – and the branches thrash into my face. Leaves stuff in my open mouth and poke into my eyes. I stumble forward blindly. And I see my hands and they are shiny with blood and there’s a knife in one of them and it’s smeared red nearly to the hilt. And I look to the others, questioning, trying to understand what I’m doing there, what’s happening.
Act III
THE CUT
20
Grace
How does evil come into our lives? Do we invite it in? Does it sit in our cells, waiting for some trigger?
It did with Mum. It was in her DNA, all those years waiting to hatch. It’s inevitable, they say, it was always going to happen. There’s nothing that made it happen and there’s nothing you could’ve done. I know it’s a disease and it has no will and no feelings, but I can’t help think of it as an evil that’s stolen in. Or, more, that every single cell in our bodies is a tiny trap ready to be sprung.
Wrong-headed. Focus on the here and now. What’s to be done? What’s to be done? A list. That’s what’s to be done. I live for lists these days. This one is for the first portion of the day:
6 a.m. Get up, bitch.
Scrub kitchen including fridge. Anything even slightly old must be thrown away immediately.
Put a wash on. Whites this time.
Prepare breakfast. Yogurt and lightly stewed apples. A dash of brown sugar for a sweet tooth.
Begin.
Currently, I’m on the last item. I peel an apple, trying to keep the peel in one piece like we used to do at Halloween; when it’s thrown over your shoulder it will form the first letter of your future husband’s name. I don’t throw the peel over my shoulder now, though. I can’t look that far ahead into the future, and besides, I don’t have the time and if the peel formed a D I think I’d lose it. The idea of ever having a husband is an impossible dream. I chop the apple finely, my silver ring flashing alongside the knife. I set the pan on the hob with a cupful of water and soon the little kitchen is full of apple smells. It takes me back to something. To the ground and what is real and what is not. It helps.
The stewed apple and yogurt has come from a book I bought from a discount bookshop, Eating for Health. At night I study nutritional groups and how the body transitions food. I read about theories that perhaps you should eat according to your blood type. I read about theories on fats and grains until the words swim in front of my eyes and I’m woken by the book falling onto the floor. I don’t know how much of all this is true, yet I resolve to discover Mum’s blood type when I can. One thing the book is very firm on is to only eat things that are organically produced. This is very expensive; I’ve looked, so I’m replacing things gradually.
When the apple is cooked to a pulp I let it cool before ladling it into a tiny glass bowl, a fancy one meant for holding dinky cocktail snacks like nuts. I found it in a cupboard when I was clearing out, flotsam left over from when Mum and Dad were together. All the things from that era seem to have a slightly jaunty aspect. It makes me believe they had fun before it all turned sour. I put the kettle on to boil, then top the apple with a spoon of yogurt and dash a little extra sugar over it today. When the kettle boils I pour the water over fresh tea leaves and let it brew for exactly three minutes, timed on the kitchen timer in the shape of a cockerel. It makes a crowing noise when it’s ready and it’s also my cue to awake properly. With a spoon and a napkin I take it all on a tray down the hall. Mum is a hunched shape in the bed and I set down the tray on the floor and gently put my hand on her shoulder; the bony flimsiness of it goes through me.
‘Mum,’ I whisper. ‘Time to wake up.’
Does she stir a little? I think so. ‘Come on, love,’ I say. ‘Come on now.’
Slowly her eyelids unfurl from their tight scrunched buds. She licks her lips.
‘Grace, my chicken,’ she says shakily.
‘It’s OK.’ I dive down the bottom of the bed and flip the covers up. I take a pale bony foot and cradle the heel in the palm of my hand.
‘I’ll give you a massage and then you can have breakfast. The tea’ll be cool enough to drink by then.’
Her face looks a little pinker today; well, the top of her cheeks anyway – there’s a patch of pink right by the cheekbone that stands out against the fresh white pillow.
This week – I find it hard to gauge time. Each day seems to be running on something, clockwork perhaps. It whistles and chugs past me round and round like a toy train. The sun rises, the cows move across the green hill opposite, right to left. As the sun comes up it lights up the city roof by roof. Clouds form, gather, disperse or grow heavy enough to break open in shower storms that cleanse the balcony of my cigarette ash. Then the day darkens. The sun plummets to the earth and the sunlit roofs go off one by one, and street lights wink on and take their place.
I shop for groceries, weighing vegetables in my hand, testing them for freshness. I seek out organic milk because I once heard that is also extra nutritious; has more fats or calcium or something – I can’t remember. Maybe I read it in that book. I mix sweet-smelling oils into the bottle of almond base oil and slick it across my hands to massage her feet, her back, her temples. I do not miss a thing. I am onto every tiny detail because that is the only way to survive, the only way to banish the filth and wreck of this world. If I take my attention away for a millisecond it will fall away into destruction and those evil traps will spring all at once.
Mum sips the tea that I hold up for her awkwardly.
When she’s finished, her head falls back onto the pillow and she opens her eyes wide. ‘I love you so much, Grace,’ she says.
‘I love you too,’ I whisper, even though she’s fallen right back to sleep, then the blood practically freezes in my veins because the buzzer to our flat rings in the hallway. I pad out of her room and stand by it, agitated. I’ll ignore it and wait until they go away, but still I’m on high alert. It rings three times more before falling silent. I pace and potter for a while, trying to repair myself from the disturbance in the atmosphere that takes time to heal over itself. I scrape out the pan of scrambled egg left over from yesterday. I curse myself for leaving it forgotten and scrub it with a metal scourer until it’s shinily new again. I’m just admiring the gleam of it when the air seems to break in half and I have to put my hand up to punch at my racing heart because someone is battering at the front door.
For a minute, I can’t move. Then, as silently as possible, I lower the saucepan onto the work surface, reach down, take off my red plastic flip flops and tiptoe to the door. When I put my eye to the spyhole I let out a gasp so loud I’m sure it can be heard on the other side. It’s Miss Kinsella for her appointment. The one I’ve only remembered now. My prediction was right. She’s one that will never go away, that will talk herself in and not take no for an answer. My whole being is on alert. I’m torn. If I open the door she’ll have to come in and it’s not mess or dirt around the taps I have to worry about. Those things seem completely inconsequential now. But if I don’t answer she’ll go away and come back even more curious, perhaps with others …