by Jon McGregor
In the entranceway of their small flat, their home all these long years, in a small cupboard where the coats and hats and shoes should be, there are gardening tools, a spade, a fork, a hoe, a small trowel, a reel of twine, paper bags full of seed packets and bulbs, an unruly coil of hosepipe. She used to keep all the tools in a small shed on the allotment, but they were stolen so many times that she’s taken to wheeling them backwards and forwards in a tartan shopping trolley. She doesn’t grow as much as she used to, she gets more tired more quickly, so now she’s planted half the allotment with bulbs. It’s nice to sit amongst the flowers when she’s having a rest, and sometimes in the spring she’ll bring a bunch of them home, put them in a vase. It brightens the place up she says and he says yes love it does, thankyou love, and he puts the kettle on and cuts her a slice of cake whenever she comes home from her patch of ground, and she drinks the tea with soil-blackened fingers, eats the cake with a napkin wrapped round it. He never goes to the allotment, he says I don’t much like all that gardening, he said I never have done love, when she first got it from the council, he said it’s the digging love, I can’t be doing with all the digging.
So he lets her go up there on her own, watching her pulling the tartan shopping trolley with the spade sticking out from the top, and when he hears her returning he puts the kettle on and she puts the things away in the small cupboard by the door.
Downstairs, the man with the carefully trimmed moustache is on the telephone again, leaving another message with the waste department of the local council. He says hello, it is me again, I telephoned earlier about the removal situation in my backyard, okay. He says I just want you to note that last time you wrote to me my name was spelt incorrectly, because you used an S and not a Z. This is close, but it is not close enough, he says. These things are important, the way you spell a man’s name, it matters, yes? he says, and he puts the phone down. He looks around him, drumming his fingers against his trousers, anxious or agitated or just at a loss as to what to do next. He will be attending a fundraising event at the club later in the day, but before then he has no plans and he doesn’t enjoy having no plans.
He takes a brush and dustpan from a cupboard beneath the kitchen sink, and he kneels in his front room, sweeping. He starts from under the bed, and he moves in a methodical line, backwards across the room. When he has finished there will be very little dirt or dust in the dustpan. He keeps his small flat exceptionally tidy, his clothes laundered and folded, his dishes washed and stacked, his rubbish doublebagged and put outside on the correct day. His friends have commented on it, when they’ve visited, and he is surprised that they consider it unusual. Because you never know do you, he says to them, you don’t know when you will be taken and you would not want people to remember you as a person without good housekeeping habits, would you? He is surprised that not everybody thinks like this, he is surprised how casually people will drop things in the street. He asked the lady at the council office about it once, he said do they not care what people think of them, and she didn’t seem to know what to say.
He puts the dustpan and brush back under the sink, he takes a duster and runs it around the clean white woodwork of the windowframe. The glass is the worst, he said this to the lady once, these piles of broken glass where people have robbed into the cars, can’t you come and at least sweep this away? This is important, he said this to her, please can you understand what broken glass in the street means, to a man of my age, coming from where I come from? He had said this, and she didn’t seem to know what to say.
Outside, in the middle of the street, the twins are still playing cricket. The first boy, the older boy by a few painful minutes, he bowls a high loop of a ball which bounces easily, his brother swinging at it with an old split-handled bat and sending the tennis ball pinging towards number fifteen. It bounces off the boarded-up window and buries itself in the overgrown front garden, and the older brother shouts it doesn’t count it doesn’t count as he kicks around in the brambles looking for it. You’re out if it hits the window he shouts, as his younger brother leaps up and down the street counting up his runs.
The young man outside number eleven watches the boy looking for his ball, his sharpened pencil hovering over his sketchpad, his protractors and rulers laid aside. A girl with a hairband flattening her hair steps out of the door behind him, she touches him lightly on the head and says do you want anything from the shop? He says no no thankyou without looking at her, and she says okay and keeps walking, she turns round and says so how’s it going anyway, the masterpiece? and he turns and sees her looking at him, she is smiling, he looks at his drawing and looks up, he shrugs and he smiles and he says oh is okay. She says I’ll buy you some chocolate, you look like you need some chocolate, and she turns and he watches her walk, he looks again at the boy hunting for his ball, kicking at the tangled overgrowth of number fifteen’s garden.
Inside number fifteen, the boy’s younger sister is standing very still, looking around in the cool dark silence. The house is almost empty, boarded up and abandoned years ago, and she is excited to be in such a private place. It feels as though she has discovered an underground chamber, a secret garden, an Ali Baba cave. She wonders what would happen if she said open sesame. She’s been in here before, once, there’s a tiny gap between the boards on the shattered back window, hidden by a huge tangle of weeds, and she thinks only she knows about it, it’s scary but it’s exciting too. She stands there, waiting for her eyes to get used to the thin splinters of light forcing their way through the cracks and gaps in the boards, and she smells the cold damp air.
Whoever it was who lived here last, whyever it was that they left, they seem to have left quickly, slipping quietly out through the back door perhaps, taking a bag of clothes and a handful of money and leaving everything else behind. There is still furniture in here, just, there are still books on shelves and pictures on walls. There’s a clock, stopped. She looks around her, wondering if anyone is here, ready to run. She can hear her own breathing in her ears, like the noise of a television without any pictures. She moves into another room, her imagination and her excitement racing ahead of her, holding her hands out as though for balance, stepping carefully.
She can see, in the near-darkness, a textbook left open on a bed, the pages speckled with mould. She can see a radio with the front hanging off, spilling wires and fuses across a desk, a screwdriver jabbed into its innards. She moves from room to room, looking, occasionally touching. Everything is soft and damp, crumbling wetly beneath her small fingers. She sees a record player with the needle still resting patiently in the groove of a record, she sees a photograph pinned to the wall, curled up and hidden from view, she sees ashtrays balanced on the arms of skeletised armchairs, snuffled clean of ash and still waiting for new cigarettes to be pressed against them.
She treads delicately up the stairs, holding onto the soft banister, swallowing, feeling guilty and delighted and scared. The rooms upstairs are the same, wetter perhaps, a little lighter, she can see more clearly the way that all of it, the carpets and the walls, the beds and the chairs, the record players and the shoes and the clocks and the ashtrays, the way that all of it is hidden, furred over, concealed by a slow slather of wet growth, mould and moss and crusted lichen creeping over it all like a lascivious tongue, muffling the hard edges, crawling across the floor, climbing up the walls, clinging from the ceilings, thickening and flowering and spraying out spores to breed in any untouched corners.
She shivers suddenly, she hears a noise, she turns and treads quickly down the damp stairs, through the back room, squeezing through the secret gap and bursting headfirst into the bright clean sunlight of the world, sucking in the sweet air, dazzled.
But if she had stayed, if she had found the courage to poke around in the dank corners, to push open rotting doors, to let her eyes see into the gloom and the shadows, she would have found a lot more.
Mice, making nests from scraps of magazines and bedding, their tiny pink eyes staring b
ack at her. Bats, hanging in wardrobes like tiny folded umbrellas. Pigeons, clustered in the corner of another room, murmuring and scratching and loosening their droppings onto the threadbare carpet. Spiders’ webs woven thicker than net curtains, skirting boards honeycombed by woodworm, blue-green algae blooming in the bathroom sink.
And in the attic, if she had managed to find her way up the steep and crumbling steps, she would have found the one room left open to the light, she would have stood, breathless, picking cobwebs from her fingers and her face, staring at a whole meadow of wildflowers and grasses, poppies and oxeyes and flowering coriander, all flourishing in bird droppings and all lunging pointedly towards the one square foot of available sky.
Chapter 19
We went out for breakfast this morning.
Michael said he owed me.
We went to a place with plastic gingham tablecloths, and big red and yellow containers of squirtable ketchup and mustard on the counter.
The door jangled when we went in, and a woman in a dirty white apron said in a minute love and went into the kitchen.
The radio was playing a rap song, the singer going my name is my name is, over and over again, as if he’d forgotten.
I said I don’t think I’ve ever been to a cafe for breakfast before, and he said don’t worry there’s nothing to be scared of it’s all quite simple and I said ha ha.
I said, but maybe, I think my mum and dad once took me to a Little Chef, I’m not sure.
We must have been driving somewhere I said, and I tried to remember the journey, where we were going, when it was.
He said what do you want then, and I forgot about it and ordered breakfast.
I said so where’s your brother now then?
He said I don’t know really.
He said he just went travelling and he didn’t really tell us where he was going.
I said oh, but doesn’t he send you postcards, hasn’t he got an email address?
He said erm no not really well sometimes, and he looked out of the window and said he was in Mexico the last time I heard.
He said hey look at that, and I looked and there was a man in a tracksuit using a bin for a toilet.
He was singing, happy birthday, and he was drinking a can of superstrength lager.
I said I recognise him I think.
He sang happy birthday to me happy birthday dear and then he stopped.
And breakfast came and it tasted good, greasy and squeaky and crisp, solid food to last a long day and we didn’t say much while we were eating it.
I tried to remember where I’d been going with my parents when we’d had breakfast at that Little Chef.
I remembered it was a journey started while it was still dark, lying on the back seat under a blanket, watching telegraph wires whipping across a whitening sky.
I remembered my dad rolling his head up and down whenever we stopped the car, squeezing the back of his neck.
My mum saying will you be okay now?
My dad telling me why a haggis has two legs longer on one side and my mum telling him to shush his mouth.
I must have been about seven years old, and I can’t think where we were going because we always seemed to go abroad for our holidays, France, Spain, Portugal, always somewhere south.
I wiped the last bit of egg yolk from my plate with a triangle of bread.
He said what’s happened to your hands?
I said nothing, nothing’s happened to my hands, and I closed my fingers over the cuts and scars on my palms.
He said no let me see, and he reached out to touch my hand and I automatically pulled away.
Oh sorry I’m sorry he said, I didn’t mean, and he didn’t finish his sentence.
I put my hands in my lap, under the table, and I watched his eyes follow them.
I rubbed them, they felt hot, they felt as though I’d grabbed an electric fence.
He said I’m sorry again, and he was blinking a lot and suddenly he looked exactly like his brother.
I thought about him, that afternoon, sitting on his doorstep looking up at me, the way he spoke, the way he moved through that awful moment.
I said what’s his name, your brother?
He looked at me and he looked down and he finished his tea.
He said excuse me, sorry, I need to, and he took a phone out of his pocket and went and stood by the door.
I watched him making a call, I wondered who he was talking to, I wondered why I didn’t think it was none of my business.
A man hurried past the window with a huge bunch of red roses, it was twice the size of his head, he didn’t look as though he could see where he was going, he was smiling massively and I don’t think anyone in the street turned to look.
I thought about his brother, the times I’d said hello, passing him in the street, standing beside him at the shop counter, I wondered why I’d never thought to ask him his name.
I remembered that whenever I saw him somewhere besides our street he’d always wait for me to say hello first, looking at me slightly sideways, as if he didn’t quite recognise me, or as if he wasn’t sure that I’d recognised him.
Michael came and sat down again, he put the phone on the table and said sorry about that, I just needed to.
The woman came and took our empty plates, and as I passed mine over I saw him looking at my hands again.
I said I’m sorry, I just.
He said I know it’s none of my business, but.
I laid them out on the table.
I said oh it’s nothing, it’s just a bit embarrassing.
He looked at them, and he moved his fingers towards them and this time I didn’t flinch or pull away but he didn’t touch them.
He said what’s embarrassing, what happened?
I said I broke some plates.
I said actually I broke all my plates, I threw them into the sink when I should have been washing them up.
I kept picking up the pieces and throwing them back in and it was only afterwards that I realised I’d cut myself I said.
He looked at me and he didn’t ask me why I’d done it.
I said it had been raining a lot that day, I lost my temper.
He looked at me.
He said raining a lot?
I said yes, you know, it just all got a bit, and I couldn’t really explain and I laughed a little. I was embarrassed.
I thought I’d made myself look stupid.
He said and what else, apart from the rain?
I looked at him, I took my hands off the table and closed my fingers over my palms again.
He said I’m sorry, I know, it’s none of my business.
I looked at him, and I looked at his hands spread across the tablecloth, and I told him.
I told him that about four weeks ago I’d discovered I was pregnant.
That I was scared and horrified and numb with shock.
That I hadn’t been able to tell anyone for a long time and I wasn’t sure why it had been so difficult.
And that when I’d told my mum she’d been polite and indifferent and I didn’t know what she really felt.
I told him that I’d thought she’d be shocked or cross or upset, but that when she was none of these things I was actually unsurprised.
I told him I hadn’t even spoken to my dad yet, that I didn’t even know whether he knew.
I said that I wasn’t ready to have a baby.
I said that I didn’t know what to do.
I said all of this very quietly, and I was amazed to hear the words coming out at all, like butterflies wriggling through net curtains.
He asked me questions, tracing his fingers across the tablecloth as if it was a map.
He asked me for the details, he said stop me if I’m going too far and I didn’t stop him.
He asked me the questions my mother didn’t ask, the who is the and the have you thought about?
I told him about the Scottish boy, and I said I couldn’t do that, I’d never thought about it
much before but now that I have I couldn’t do it.
And when I started crying a little he unfolded a paper napkin from the rack and passed it to me and looked away.
He said I’m sorry, I said no, it’s okay, I’m okay, and I twisted the napkin around my finger like a bandage.
He said, your parents, maybe they, perhaps you could go and see them, perhaps it’s just a telephone thing he said. I said I don’t know it’s too far, I can’t afford it, and he said I’ll drive you, please, I’d like to drive you there.
I said, oh, you don’t need to do that for me, I couldn’t, I mean, and he said I wouldn’t be doing it for you.
Chapter 20
The daughter of the man with the scarred hands sits in the front doorway of their house, she looks across the street and she sees the boy from the house opposite on his tricycle, he is pedalling along the pavement and his father is walking behind him, carrying a tall glass of water. The boy pedals until he gets to number seventeen, then he scuffles his feet on the paving stones to stop and he looks at his father and points.
His father walks up to the front door and knocks, loudly. He is a tall thin man, with bony hands and a beard cut close to his face. He bangs on the door again, and the twins stop their cricket game to watch.
The door handle moves, and the father straightens his stance, clutches the glass a little tighter. A voice says hold on it’s stuck again I’ll go to the window, and the father steps into the overgrown front garden. A face appears at the window, the boy with the white shirt and the tie, his shirt very crumpled now, he looks as if he’s only just woken up and he squints in the light and he says hello?