7 Miles Out

by Carol Morley

  ‘What happened to the lad yer were going to meet?’ I asked.

  ‘Oh,’ the nurse said, giggling, ‘I married him.’

  *

  My sister came to visit with her boyfriend and they brought me the new Gary Numan album. I had been secretly hoping that people might bring me presents.

  ‘Ta Susan. Thanks Greg.’

  ‘That’s all right.’

  I wondered if Susan still had the scar on her foot from when she had been run over by a car. The day it had happened Dad had answered the phone and I’d secretly watched as he stood in the hallway, his hand gripping the receiver tightly as his voice became suddenly hushed. After the call, he whispered urgently to Mum and they both rushed from the house. I had sat watching TV with my brother, worrying about what was going on and whether Susan was dead or alive.

  It turned out a car had run over her foot when she was crossing the road to buy a Cadbury’s Creme Egg. I remember the egg was always an important part of the story whenever it was told. When she came home, she lay on the settee under a blanket and her friends came over and she weakly showed off the tyre indentation on the side of her foot. One friend bought her a multi-pack of nail varnishes in the colours of the rainbow that I would have killed for. She was always getting presents of one sort or another. Bouquets of red roses often arrived for her from mystery men.

  ‘Mum said the Truant Officer came to see her,’ Susan said.

  ‘But I’m in hospital.’

  ‘Yeah, but Mum forgot to call the school to say.’

  I thought of Mum avoiding explaining my situation and laughed.

  On the eighth day of being in hospital, my daily X-ray showed the fifty pence had gone. All the white coats wondered how it was impossible to be aware of it making the journey from my body. I was relieved to be leaving the hospital, glad that I was no longer going to be the centre of every joke.

  ‘Yer mam will never get that sliced loaf now,’ said one of the nurses. I didn’t bother smiling.

  I would have caught the bus home on my own but it was the rule that you had to leave with a guardian. Mum came to collect me and I felt I was walking through the hospital corridors next to a stranger. She had random chats with passing nurses and doctors, and I found myself despairing that she had no idea how to have a proper conversation. She was always saying either too little or too much and always to the wrong people. I caught other people giving her a puzzled look as she spoke to them. Why couldn’t she just be normal?

  At home I lay on my bed and listened to Gary Numan’s spacey electronic voice. I thought of madness and near-death experiences and realised that madness and death could happen at any moment and people around you might not even notice. I thought of Dad, driving the car that I could no longer remember the colour of, the car that he chose to die in. I kept returning the stylus to play one Numan track in particular:

  ‘Here in my car

  I know I’ve started to think

  About leaving tonight

  Although nothing seems right

  In cars’

  dig it up again

  Margaret Thatcher was outside Downing Street after winning the general election. Her waved hairdo was rigid in the breeze that fluttered the collar of her blouse. ‘I just about owe everything to my father,’ she said, ‘I really do. He brought me up—’ Tiger lunged for the screen and his claws screeched down the thick glass telly window, obliterating all that she had to say about fathers.

  ‘He’s having one of his mad half-hours,’ Mum said.

  Tiger tore around the room. Every day he put time aside to chase invisible mice, but he seemed different today, more on edge. He jumped onto the settee and sprung onto Mum’s fleshy upper arm and sunk his teeth and claws into her. She began to cry. She was pushing Tiger away, but he was refusing to let go.

  ‘Help me, please!’

  Realising there was only me to do something, I clasped Tiger around his soft spongy middle with my hands and pulled. Tiger’s teeth and claws tightened and Mum screamed as I yanked him away. I dropped him on the carpet before he could attack me. He threw himself at the wall and howled.

  ‘Something’s not right,’ Mum said.

  We ran into the hallway and shut Tiger in. His long thin wails mingled with our laughter. It felt wrong to be laughing, but we couldn’t help it.

  ‘We should phone a vet,’ I said.

  Still laughing, Mum hurriedly leafed through the Yellow Pages and rang a local surgery and made arrangements. She put the phone down.

  ‘Five pounds they’re charging. Cash not cheque. Daylight robbery in anyone’s book,’ she grumbled.

  She rang Susan; Susan only had a communal phone in a hallway so nobody answered for a long time and we started to giggle again at the sound of Tiger’s cries. Eventually Mum spoke to Susan and asked her to send her boyfriend with a cardboard box to come and collect Tiger. We sat down on the stairs in the hall and waited for Greg. I put my fingers in my ears and closed my eyes and listened to my breathing.

  Greg arrived. Mum pushed him into the lounge and pulled the door shut behind him. Yowling penetrated deep into my head. It was the long, drawn-out sound of suffering, but I still couldn’t stop laughing.

  With a victorious expression and a bloody strip of claw mark on his face, Greg tiptoed from the lounge. He held the cardboard box high above his head so I couldn’t see Tiger, but I could hear his sounds, which had become whimpers. Mum reluctantly pushed the five-pound note into Greg’s pocket. I followed him down the stairs and onto the street where he broke into a jog, the box stretched out on his open arms, like an offering to the gods.

  When Greg returned he was empty-handed. ‘The vet said it looked like his liver exploded,’ he said.

  Greg shuffled about nervously for a few moments. I looked at him stonily and then sat down to watch television. I knew that Greg was looking at me, but I was not going to look at him even though I wanted to ask him where the liver was and what it looked like.

  ‘There was nothing the vet could do,’ he said.

  ‘Where’s Tiger now?’ Mum asked.

  ‘He’s going to take care of him,’ Greg said gravely. ‘No extra fee.’

  Greg left and Mum looked at me and smiled. Why was she trying to make things better? What was the point?

  ‘It wouldn’t surprise me if Greg went and pocketed that fiver,’ she said, laughing. ‘He probably didn’t even go to the vet. He’s down that pub right now, I can picture him.’

  I hoped she was right. I decided Tiger had actually scrambled free of the box and was preying on neighbourhood mice. Maybe he’d make his own way home. Tiger had been around forever and I couldn’t imagine life without him. Mum often despaired that he wouldn’t eat anything but Whiskas, which was the most expensive variety of cat food. I thought of the way Mum would jokily Hoover up the end of Tiger’s tail and how he always ended up with his fur standing on end.

  For a few days I waited for Tiger to return, but he never came back and I realised he was gone. He would never again sit on the top of the TV and block our view with his tail.

  My head felt heavy and solid and I wondered if I was about to cry. I hadn’t cried for so long that I didn’t know any more how it would feel. I wanted to find Tiger’s body and open up his little red mouth and hold back his white whiskers and give him the kiss of life. I wanted to resuscitate him, my tabby cat with his wise green eyes.

  In any case I was not going to let him be forgotten. I bought two tins of model aircraft paint from the newsagent and found a rock and painted it silver. In black paint I wrote TIGER RIP on the side. Outside, I laid the rock in front of the shrubbery that bordered our block of flats.

  Because it was my first funeral I was not sure of what to do. I prayed that Tiger was at peace but still having his mad half-hours and that he had a healthy liver again and wherever he was they had Whiskas. On my recorder I played a made up tune that sounded serious and mournful.

  The vet had probably burnt Tiger. It was cheaper th
an burial. I wished I had seen his dead body. ‘Ashes to ashes, dust to dust,’ I chanted over and over, thinking of fire, thinking of smoke, thinking of bodies disappearing.

  *

  The next day when I got in from school I opened the front door to a cloud of smoke. I found Mum in the bathroom, where she was fanning orange flames that flared from the bath. The edges of her hair were singed and her face was covered in soot.

  ‘Mum, what yer doing?’

  ‘I just wanted to get rid of things.’

  ‘What things?’

  ‘Just some documents.’

  ‘What kind?’

  ‘Stop being nosy, madam. It’s none of your business.’

  Mum twisted the bath taps on. Water gushed and killed the flames. I joined her and we looked down at the sodden mash of black ashes. The wall by the bath was scorched. What had she been burning? If it was paper, couldn’t she have ripped it up? What had she gone and destroyed that I didn’t know about?

  Mum was in one of her quiet moods afterwards. She sat on the settee in front of the TV and picked away at her scalp. I lay on the floor, feeling like her bodyguard, eyeing her out of the corner of my eye and making sure that she didn’t get up to any more funny business. She fell asleep, her face still smeared with soot, her jaw grinding. I watched her orange dress rise and fall with each soft snore, and felt angry that Dad had left her behind. Even though she was asleep her expression remained tense, as if even her dreams were causing her problems.

  brynn

  It’s satisfying to watch the orange flames destroy the red final notice bills and every official letter she has ever had. She thinks about the kind of women who burn their bras and decides that they have no idea. They’re all flat-chested and don’t know what it’s like to need proper support.

  She sometimes wishes she could do what he did and end it all. But she can’t be a misery guts. She decides Ann needs to see a family in action. She’s going to invite everyone for Christmas and show how it can be done under her roof. Mum, Dad, sister Jan and her kids, childless-sister Barb and her new boyfriend, and then, of course, her own kids – Rob in London with his girlfriend, tall and thin enough to get a modelling job somewhere abroad, and Susan and her boyfriend Greg. Ann will have a whale of a time with everyone around. Tomorrow she’ll make the calls, she’ll get the family together, she’ll start a new leaf. She’ll get the biggest turkey they’ve ever seen and she’ll put on the best Christmas they’ve ever had in their whole damn lives.

  Ann comes in and asks something ridiculous about why she’s started a fire in the bath and her mood plummets. She wonders how easy it will really be to have Christmas here – it’s only a small place. She decides that it’s a bad idea and maybe the best thing to do on the whole is to forget about Christmas. It’s seven months away and it’s not like anybody cares – and it’s already feeling like more trouble than it’s worth.

  the expected guests

  Mum snaked silver tinsel around the flat while I wrote out Christmas cards to my classmates. The prettiest cards in the box, the ones with silver sparkle, were going to the people in my class at school that I liked and the ugliest ones, the candle and ivy cards, went to people that I didn’t, but it was important that everyone got a card.

  Mum had invited her mum and dad – Granny and Granddad Hughes – and my aunties and cousins for the festive season and said it would be the best time ever. I drew a map of where everyone would sleep.

  ‘Put me in the bath,’ Mum said, merrily.

  Christmas Eve arrived and nearly everyone with it. I looked around, as coats were stripped off, bags were dropped and mugs of tea were handed out. Auntie Barb looked calm enough. She had a reputation for being highly strung and having a chip on her shoulder. My granny and granddad had quite recently been in a car accident, and so Granny arrived with a crutch and kept pulling slivers of windscreen glass from her face. According to her doctor these glass fragments were buried very deep and would make their way out over time.

  ‘Lucky to be alive,’ she said, patting me on the head by way of a greeting and explaining they had the crash because of Granddad’s cataracts.

  My brother had not appeared yet and I counted down the minutes till he did. The way I mostly kept in touch with Rob was to read the articles he wrote for Melody Express, where he reviewed gigs, or interviewed a lead singer or a band. Mum said that he was making a name for himself and pointed out to my youngest cousin something Rob had written. ‘Doesn’t he write neatly?’ my cousin said, thinking Rob was responsible for the typeface.

  The doorbell rang. My ten-year-old cousin Martin ran to answer and in strode Rob in an electric blue coat, which Auntie Jan stroked.

  ‘Very London,’ she said.

  Everyone else began to fire questions at him as though he was a hero returning from the war. He stood tall in the middle of the lounge giving his answers as though he was being interviewed on television. I ran to my bedroom, sat on my bed and sulked.

  Auntie Jan came in, waving a cigarette at me.

  ‘What’s going on?’ she asked.

  ‘Rob didn’t even bother looking at me,’ I said.

  ‘Don’t be daft,’ she said. ‘He’s just had a long journey that’s all.’

  She glided her fingers over the tips of my dyed black spikes.

  ‘I used to have my hair all colours. Pink it was once,’ she said, recalling her days training as a hairdresser.

  ‘Will yer teach me how to do proper backcombing?’ I asked her.

  ‘Course I will.’

  I cheered up and followed her back into the lounge. A grey spiralling haze of cigarette smoke surrounded everyone. I sat cross-legged on the floor and watched Mum, Granny, my sister and aunties darting cigarettes to and from their mouths while Granddad carefully loaded up his pipe. Rob sat on a chair, one leg folded so his foot rested on the knee of his other leg. He didn’t smoke and his fingers tapped a complicated rhythm on the chair arms.

  ‘I’m going to become an anarchist, you know,’ Granny told him. ‘I said to my landlord, “We could talk all day about bribery and corruption, me and you.” He didn’t know where to put himself.’

  Rob looked at me. ‘All right Nip?’ he asked. I wanted to ignore him like he had ignored me but I couldn’t help but be pleased. He had called me Nip ever since I could remember because I was the nipper of the family. I missed stretching out on the settee next to him, top to toe. Most of all, I missed the way he was so good at calming Mum down.

  *

  On Christmas Day I was the first one up and the flat was cold and dark and the silence was not silent to me at all, but buzzed in my ears. I needed company. I shook my seven-year-old cousin awake.

  ‘Father Christmas has been and gone!’ I said.

  We ate an entire selection box each, chocolate flaking and melting onto our nighties.

  My best present was from Auntie Jan who had given me a book called A Thousand and One Things a Girl Can Do and had filled a shoebox with, amongst other things, Sellotape, glue and origami paper.

  Rob had stayed with his girlfriend overnight. Her father was a butcher and Rob was due to return with a fresh turkey. Mum and Auntie Jan waited anxiously for him to arrive, and when he turned up late, they peered inside the bag he offered and looked horrified.

  ‘That’s not a fresh turkey!’ Mum said.

  ‘It’s frozen!’ Auntie Jan said.

  ‘It’s just what he gave me,’ Rob said.

  ‘It’ll never be ready in time,’ Mum said. ‘What do you expect me to do! It’s all right for you, Rob, you’re a vegetarian – but there’s everyone else to feed!’

  The problem was solved when Granny suggested running the bird under the hot tap.

  ‘Well, it’s a good job I’ve had the immersion heater on all hours,’ Mum said.

  She hauled the bird into the bath and left the hot water running over the icy, pale flesh. Auntie Barb remarked to everyone that she thought it was a disgraceful sight. She wouldn’t let us forget
it. She had met her ginger-bearded boyfriend through the vegan newsletter.

  Mum insisted on making Christmas dinner without help and explained that the kitchen was too small for anyone else to fit into anyway. She popped into the lounge to fan her hot face that had turned strawberry.

  ‘What must I look like! I haven’t even had a sherry yet!’ she laughed.

  The smell of roast potatoes and turkey hung temptingly in the air.

  ‘I’m starving,’ I said.

  ‘When your granddad was a boy, starving didn’t mean hungry, it meant cold,’ Granny said. ‘Isn’t that right, Arthur?’

  Granddad didn’t reply.

  ‘His hearing aid’s on the blink,’ Granny explained.

  Mum piled the plates high with turkey, pizza, stuffing, roast potatoes, mashed potatoes, sprouts and carrots, and we propped our plates on our knees or on the floor.

  Crackers were pulled and snapped, spilling out paper crowns that we all slipped on with growing optimism. There were groans and titters as dumb jokes were read out loud. The television was turned down but not switched off, so it flickered cosily in the background. We were a real family. I wished we had a piano so that we could crowd around it and sing Christmas carols, even though none of us could play the piano.

  Granddad asked for gravy.

  Mum looked crushed. ‘I’ve gone and forgotten to do the damn gravy,’ she said.

  Auntie Jan cast a furious look at Granddad.

  ‘Dad, let Brynn sit and eat. She’s been slaving away all morning.’

  ‘What?’ Granddad said.

  ‘Let him have his gravy if he wants,’ Granny said.

  ‘It’s OK. I’ve changed me mind,’ Granddad said.

  ‘Course you want gravy, Arthur. I’ll go and make you some,’ Granny shouted. She tried to lever herself off her chair with her metal crutch.

  ‘He said to forget the gravy,’ Auntie Jan said.

  I looked at Auntie Barb. She hadn’t uttered a word but I wondered if she was going to start screaming. She was tucking into her mashed potatoes and ignoring the commotion. It was probably because she was with her new boyfriend and, according to Mum, she would be on her best behaviour.