People found it bizarre that they should become parents now, after fifteen years of marriage. Why wait so long? they’d say, or, Whatever for? ‘It was an accident,’ she’d say. ‘We thought we couldn’t.’ Most people laughed at that but some looked disappointed, as if they wished she’d invented a prettier story. Still, it was the truth.
Now and then the car wavered in its lane. Sarah felt John’s strength falter and she understood the effort it took to keep the three of them on this road. She wondered, not for the first time, whether this was the cost of her choice to go ahead with the pregnancy. She was 43 and he 50 – far too old to be having babies.
By the time they reached his mother’s place it was one in the morning and the town was shuttered up for sleep with only a few late-night stragglers stumbling home. Ann was at the door as soon as she heard their car, greedy arms out-stretched.
Sarah and John put on a show of being on speaking terms, but Ann wasn’t interested in them. ‘Give him to me,’ she crooned. ‘The babe, the babe. Let me hold him. Come to me, my precious.’
The next day was freezing but bright, rinsed clean by the storm. To Sarah’s relief, her mother-in-law set out early with one of the neighbours to be sure of getting good seats in church. Sarah and John got ready in silence. When it was time to leave the house John went ahead without a backward glance. Sarah followed with the pram. There was no traffic so they walked in the middle of the road. Fifteen years. His face was so familiar to her that she could hardly even see him, and yet lately he’d become a stranger.
She had given up her job in order to spend the first year with the child, but at times like this she felt she’d made a terrible mistake. She had made herself dependent just when John became undependable. There were moments of great joy, but she was always responding, always governed by the machine-gun tattoo of the child’s needs or John’s moods, supplying whatever seemed to be required. Now. Now. Now. Some days she felt that ‘accident’ was the most accurate description of what had happened to them and that everything she’d ever known and valued had been consumed in the wreckage.
A pigeon flapped by overhead and the baby gave a wordless exclamation of pleasure. That was new. She smiled down at him, admiring the curve of his head, the kiss-curl on his brow, those fat, perfect little hands fiddling with the tassels of his blanket. She leaned in to straighten the neck of his christening gown. He caught a hank of her hair and tugged it like a bell-pull. She laughed. The feeling of dread inside her lifted a little. It was 9.15 am. They had fifteen minutes before the start of the service.
She walked on.
Each street was much like the next, rows of two-up, two-down houses, mostly pebble-dashed and double-glazed. Outside Mitzi’s Hair Salon John had paused, waiting for her to catch up, though still with his back turned. He was talking to an elderly man with a terrier. Sarah slowed her pace, hoping that the man would be gone before she got there. She wasn’t in the mood for small talk.
Now John turned around, beaming, as if no cross word had ever passed between them. ‘Sarah, come and say hullo. This is Rhydian. Rhydian, this is my wife. And this . . .’ John looked down at the pram with a faintly surprised expression. ‘. . . this is my son.’
They all stood and gazed at the child. How could such a gleaming creature have sprung from two such worn and bitter bodies?
‘I’ve known Rhydian all my life,’ John was saying. ‘I remember during the miners’ strike, we’d be out in front of Woolworths collecting for them. Isn’t that right, Rhydian?’
‘Aye.’ The old man nodded.
‘That’s, what, twenty years ago, now?’
‘Thirty, more like,’ said Rhydian, wheezing. ‘You were still a bit wet behind the ears back then.’
John shook his head. ‘Terrible. All those pits closed in the end, just like we said.’
‘Aye,’ said Rhydian. ‘And Woolworths.’
The baby had begun to fuss and wriggle under his blankets.
‘We need to get a move on, John,’ Sarah whispered. To Rhydian she explained that Ann was keeping seats for them in the church. She nodded at the child. ‘He’s being christened today.’
‘Mustn’t keep you, then,’ said Rhydian, patting John on one shoulder. ‘Give my best to your mother.’
They walked on. Soon the high street was in view. Groups of mostly elderly people in their best clothes were making their way up the hill towards the church. But John was looking in the opposite direction, down a side road.
‘When I was ten I fell off my bike over there,’ he said. ‘Skinned my leg all the way from the ankle to the knee. And when I was older, sixteen or seventeen, I remember I persuaded this boy to let me try his motorbike along here. But he didn’t tell me how to stop. I had to crash into a wall.’ The meeting with Rhydian seemed to have tipped him back into the past. ‘When I went up to the grammar school, I used to travel with a boy who lived on the left, there, Gareth Mason.’
Sarah chewed her thumbnail. Somehow she had to get him to hurry up without triggering a row. Ann would be counting the seconds by now, eyes fixed on the door at the back of the church.
‘Gareth Mason, eh?’ She forced a smile.
‘Yes, he lived along there at number twelve. He was abroad for years, working for one of the big oil companies, but he’s been ill. My mother was telling me he’s moved back home to recuperate.’
Sarah kept the smile going though on the inside she was raging: that she should be forced to behave like an airhostess with her own husband and, worst of all, that John seemed to prefer this fake, grinning persona to her real self.
‘Tell you what,’ he was saying, ‘I’m just going to knock the door and see if Gareth’s in. Just a quick hullo. We’ve got plenty of time.’ He took the pram away from her and set off down the side street. Sarah hurried after him. What will we do after today, she wondered? The road keeps running into sand.
A gaunt-looking man answered the door. There was laughter and back-slapping, then to Sarah’s dismay the two of them began to pull the pram into the house. Had John lost his mind? The service was about to begin. They had seven minutes to get the church.
‘A baby, eh?’ said Gareth Mason, looking everywhere but at the child. He showed them into a warm, cluttered sitting room where a game of football played silently on TV. ‘I’ll make some tea.’ He left the room.
‘We don’t have time for this!’ Sarah hissed. She yanked the pram handles in her temper so that the baby gave a soft cry of protest.
John didn’t seem to hear. He was kneeling on the floor, looking through Gareth Mason’s vinyl collection, murmuring with pleasure at various albums he recognised.
Gareth came back and leaned in the doorway while he waited for the kettle to boil. ‘They were up in the loft for years,’ he said, nodding at the stack of albums. ‘Mam never throws anything out.’
John pulled out a David Bowie album. ‘Unbelievable, isn’t it, to think he’s gone?’
‘Shocking,’ said Gareth.
‘He always looked so alive. So indestructible. Though mind you, he had a heart attack in the noughties, didn’t he? He nearly died on stage.’
John began to read through the song titles under his breath. ‘Changes. That’s him in a nutshell, isn’t it? He reinvented himself so many times. So many lives he lived.’
Gareth opened his mouth to say something, but the kettle whistled in the kitchen. He went out.
Sarah was lurching between panic and a white-hot fury. She began to turn the pram around towards the hall. ‘John, your mother is sitting there in front of the whole congregation waiting for us. We have to go right NOW or we’ll miss the start and she will never, ever forgive us . . .’
John had pulled another record from its sleeve and was running one finger lightly around the outer rim.
‘Did you hear me, John?’
‘Let’s not rush,’ he murmured. ‘I
t’s just a normal church service to begin with. The christening bit isn’t till the very end.’ And then, almost inaudibly, ‘There’s something I need to tell you.’
‘Oh.’ She let her hands slip away from the pram. ‘Right now?’
‘There’s never a good time, is there?’
A chill spread through her. I knew it, I knew it, I knew it. He’s leaving. He’s met someone who isn’t constantly covered in baby sick, someone who finishes their sentences, who isn’t always too tired for sex. She took a few faltering steps into the centre of the room, then retreated to the sofa so that when it came – the end of the road – she wouldn’t have too far to fall.
‘Go on.’
In the kitchen they could hear the ring of a spoon on china. Something metallic fell with a crash.
John put the record away. ‘So,’ he said. He scrubbed his mouth with the back of one hand. ‘You remember I had that hospital appointment last year about the deafness in my right ear? Remember? And I never heard back from them so I assumed . . .’
This was not what she’d been expecting. Not at all.
John was still speaking. He was using words like: ‘scan’ and ‘tumour’. Sarah wanted to respond but all she could manage was strangled noise at the back of her throat.
‘. . . they put the result in the wrong pile, apparently, or they misfiled it, or lost it. Something. They should have called me in sooner,’ he said. ‘But anyway, they’re on the case now. And it’s not too late. It’s a slow-growing one, apparently. So they’re going to open up just here.’ He indicated a place behind his ear. ‘And whip it out.’
Sarah sank backwards into the sofa. Motes of dust tumbled in the stream of winter sunlight from the window behind her. She felt she might never get up again.
John came and sat beside her. ‘You mustn’t worry, Sarah.’ He took her hand. ‘The surgeon does these operations all the time. I googled him. He’s world class.’ He laughed. ‘Funny, isn’t it? All that time when you were pregnant, I was growing a tumour. Like a competition.’
She turned to him in a daze. How long is it, she wondered, since I’ve heard him laugh?
Gareth Mason came in clutching three mugs in his trembling, skeletal hands. ‘I put milk in all of them,’ he said. ‘I wasn’t sure.’
‘Good man.’ John’s face was open and relaxed. You could see what he must have been like, Sarah thought, when he and Gareth Mason were friends.
Gareth gave Sarah her tea, then went over to the stack of records and fished out a cinnamon-coloured album. ‘Remember this one, John? 1977, Low. Let me play you my favourite track.’ He bent down and fiddled with the stereo.
‘It’ll be all right, Sarah,’ John whispered. ‘I promise.’ And then, ‘Sorry about the things I said last night. I didn’t really mean any of it.’
‘I love this one,’ said Gareth, dropping the needle onto the disc.
There was a brief crackle like bacon in a pan, then David Bowie began to sing ‘Always Crashing in the Same Car’. Gareth Mason hummed along. John drank his tea. The baby rubbed his ear and grew sweaty and fell asleep. And Sarah closed her eyes and went hurtling into the welter of possibilities ahead, hoping that John would be right, that they would be lucky – luckier than the miners, luckier than Woolworths, luckier, even, than David Bowie with all his many, many lives.
Cluster
NAOMI BOOTH
The man two doors down pursues a secret hobby in the dead of night. This is one of your first discoveries.
You’ve seen him around, in the daytime, in the time before, but only to nod to. He’s a solid man with a mild demeanour and you’ve always assumed he’s a postman, or a hospital porter, or a refuse collector; that he is engaged in some stolid, civic-minded profession. Surely a man like him should have no trouble sleeping. But just a few nights in, you find him out. You haven’t slept at all. The nightlight is a small crescent of brightness in the dark blur of milk and skin and adrenaline that night has become. There is a sound outside. Something clangs as it drops onto the ground: metal against concrete. Shuffling, shoe scuffing, a mechanistic clacking. None of these noises would be loud enough to wake you, if you were fast asleep. But in this new nocturnal world, they are more insistent than daytime sounds. They are intimate, in the same way that voices on the telephone whorl into the dark of your ear, closer even than someone speaking next to you.
You glance at your phone, which now sleeps under the corner of your pillow. You tilt it, make it glow. Three twenty-five. There have been letters from the police, opened by the people in the flat downstairs and left on the table in the shared hallway, letters about burglaries in the area. You should get out of bed and check on these sounds. Even the thought of witnessing a crime is poor motivation, but you make yourself move: you rise up past the Moses basket, make your way to the window. You move the curtain, just a fraction. You look out over two lines of backyards and the black river of cobbles that bisects them. You stand very still, waiting for another sound. It comes again: the jangle of metal, the sound of someone about some secret business. You survey the terraces until you locate the source: two doors down, there’s a small tilley lamp at the end of a yard and a man crouched down beside it. It takes a while for the scene to sharpen into coherence. A man crouches over a wheel, spinning it. A bike is upside down, and the man stoops over it, working on something at the wheel-hub, adjusting it, then spinning the wheel again. You watch for a while. The man’s movements are slow and full of care. He works over the body of the bike with a soft cloth periodically; stands back and puts his hands in his pockets. You let the curtain fall back into place. All this detail, all this secret work, is folded back into the dark. After that, you listen for him in the nighttime, when the baby frets and whinnies awake, over and over again, startling out of sleep as though she is falling, falling, into something terrible, her tiny limbs twitching, her mouth a worried beak; the baby who does not yet know what sleep is, who does not know its softness. You listen for the man when you scoop the baby up again and again and rock it and try to teach it how to sleep, whilst beginning to forget how to yourself. You listen for him moving around, or the creak of a bike chain, like a reptile in the night; you listen for his nighttime industry, a shadow of yours.
* * *
Callum sleeps. He sleeps through all of it, even just a few days in. How can he, you wonder. The baby makes such noises, such terrible tiny rasps and rattles and sighs, as though breathing is altogether too difficult, as though she might give up on it at the turn of each breath. Fifteen days old, the creature at your breast. The nightlight glances off her darting eyes: half-blind eyes that can barely see beyond your face, but they flicker wildly when the baby latches, as though she is checking sideways for competition or predators. You hear scuffling outside: the secret mechanic, you think. But this is not him. The scuffling is more persistent and less careful. There is laughter, and then there are low voices. Earlier in the night there was bellowing and singing, the voices of groups of people veering wildly as they stumbled home from the pub. It’s Friday night, you remind yourself; the weeks have lost their shape now that the nighttime lasts so much longer than the day. Today you took the baby to a class, a class for new mothers in the city centre, so you know that it was Friday today. At the end of the class there had been an opportunity to ask questions. You’d all sat in a circle on beanbags, your babies bundled in blankets. The other women looked variously blissful or alarmed or stupefied by the creatures in their arms. I read a story about a bottle of baby powder exploding and the baby choking on the dust, one woman said. Is it true? Can talcum powder kill them? Am I not supposed to be powdering him? God, another woman said, there are stories about everything. Try to relax a bit. This one’s my second and the older one, she’s five, she came home from school yesterday and said, Mum, what’s terrorism? Just you wait until that happens, then you can really start to worry. This is the easy bit. Some of other women in the circle
had begun to fidget then, to shift uncomfortably on their bean bags, whether from their episiotomies or from the talk of terrorism or from the thought of all of this being easy, it was difficult to say. You resolved never to go to a mums’ group again.
The murmuring continues outside. The baby is still at your breast. The baby has been at your breast all night. Cluster feeding, the health visitor who led the group had explained, is very common in the early days. The baby might feed for hours in the night. Hours and hours. It’s clever. It knows when to seek its mother out, with the best chance of her undivided attention, with the best chance of her body guarding it against the cold, and snakes, and raiders. But we don’t have snakes in South Leeds, do we, one dazed-looking girl had said. Oh I know, dear, the health visitor said, I’m speaking ev-o-lut-ionarily. The new word flickers in your mind as the baby’s face repeatedly shivers into your breast, searching and finding. Cluster feed. Cluster fuck. Cluster bomb. None of the associations are exactly encouraging.
You’re listening to the voices but you don’t move. There’s a bit of back and forth out there; some sort of negotiation is taking place. They’ve settled in one spot, close to the back of the house. You scoop the baby up, keeping her latched, when you finally move to the window. You move the curtain just a fraction. There are three of them in the back alley, three lads. Two of them are jittering about: moving from foot to foot, pushing hands into pockets, taking them out again, pushing them back in. The other man is making a show of not being nervous. He’s wearing a bulky jacket and he leans back into the light cast by the street lamp at the very end of the alley so that he can count their money. He’s selling: he passes something over to one of the lads. Then he’s off, leaving the pair of them to lean into one another, to unwrap their tiny parcel.
Best British Short Stories 2019 Page 11