Daniel’s lawyer has a voice like unguent. As he speaks through the letterbox, she imagines him licking up sweat with the moist dark dab of his tongue.
‘Mrs Carmichael, I have here written instruction for you to vacate the premises no later than tomorrow afternoon. We’re not playing games here, girlie. This is legal imbroglio. You have to think about where you stand.’
He posts the papers and retreats, though regrettably she has now run out of salami to post back out. Picking up the collection of envelopes, she moves immediately to one addressed in Daniel’s handwriting, though the note inside is only a typed rehashing of all the offers he has made her over the past six months: the Alfa Romeo, a sterling-silver knife set, a collection of Danish miniatures, half the books, half the frequent- flier miles, all the jewellery free and clear.
‘My heart bleeds,’ Cece had said, looking over a similar list only weeks after the divorce was first floated. Slicing blue cheese. Smear of apricot jam at her lip. ‘He takes the car so you only get the other car. He takes the credit cards so you only get the gold bullion and the diamond mine.’
She takes the envelopes through to the kitchen and wanders out onto the deck. For the fourth or fifth time, the jellyfish have flooded the shore, but this time the men from the clean-up crew have hit upon the idea of building a bonfire. Not far from the headland, a great tower of bodies is forming – headless, shapeless things stacked one and another, the flimsy outlines of creatures drained of all substance, souping down into the bedrock of the shore. The television crew has returned and is filming a walk-and-talk along the ridge of the dunes. ‘And what I believe we can expect in a matter of minutes, Cathy, is an inflagration potentially unlike any we have seen before.’ – ‘A conflagration, Tim. Inflagration isn’t a word.’
Nicola watches the small crowd milling around the bonfire, men heaving shovelfuls onto the pile. The fire, when it goes up, is a faint and queasy blue, filling the air with the smell of something boiling. On the deck, Nicola folds in half the typed page she is still holding and finds a further scribble in black biro overleaf.
Nicola for God’s sake, grow up.
She is out of food, except for crackers, which have grown soft from being left unwrapped. With nothing to occupy her, she falls asleep on the floor of the bedroom in the early afternoon. She dreams first about her wedding: the prawn cocktails in martini glasses and Daniel swinging her around to ‘Try a Little Tenderness’. Cece had given a speech about her little sister – We always knew Nic would find someone dependable – and Nicola had tried to make her own toast, although at this point, the dream changes and she imagines herself a jellyfish – a blind thing, tearable as paper, sinking down beneath black water on a moonless febrile night.
Before their father died, he had called her the princess, the precious cargo. Pressed his hands together and mimed an attendant’s bow.
‘There is a lack of self-preservation about you,’ Cece had said, midway through their father’s funeral, ‘which is frankly a vanity. You assume other people will care enough to look after you.’
In asking for a divorce, Daniel had told her he knew that it was at least partially his fault. Leaning over with his hands on his knees, he had spoken to the floor of the deck, explaining that he hadn’t considered the pitfalls inherent in really taking ownership of someone. She had told him, as she had that first night at dinner, that she could actually take care of herself, though he had only shaken his head once again and taken his ring off, easy as pie.
In the evening, Nicola leaves the house and walks down the narrow jag of path onto the beach. The bonfire has burned itself out over the course of the day and what is left is only skeletal. A coil of indigo smoke. The shore is quiet, clean, the way it had been when Daniel first walked her down it, holding her hand and her elbow to guide her over divots in the sand. She navigates her own way now, turns her ankle only briefly on the slope.
Up over the dunes, she can see the deck that wraps around the house, the plates and cups she has left there, the dressing gown she has abandoned to the back of a chair. Daniel’s lawyer will not, she imagines, appreciate the mess when he returns tomorrow, nor will he appreciate the empty house or the fact that she has left the front door open, thrown the windows wide on both the north and southern sides, left the key under the mat.
The evening is soft now, wheel of night gulls on the water. In her bag, she has the Russian dolls from QVC, the egg timer filled with coloured sand, the machine for counting change. The pottery cat she has had to leave behind, being too unwieldy to lift.
It is just after ten in the evening, no particular rush to be gone. She sits down in the sand, a spot just beyond the wrack line, and works idly at the ring on her still-swollen finger, turning it round in fruitless circles, never raising it above the knuckle. There will be more jellyfish. Later, washing up in the tight apple-light that follows dawn, a product of the early tide. When they come, she will still be here, salt-rimed from a night on the shore. She will lay herself down, await the convocation. Jellyfish beaching against her arms and legs, the crest of body on delicate body. They will cover her, glove her hands, circle her ankles. Dependant on species, it can take a jellyfish up to fifty minutes to die once out of water. In the thin lifeline of a waning tide, that time can be easily tripled. Nicola will stay with them well into the morning, their pulsing bells like so many painful hearts. Blanketed, almost head to toe, she will feel the tide recede. Her fingers will come to feel a touch gelatinous at their points, softened along their webbing. She will imagine herself sinking down, becoming something less than solid, spilling insides onto the sand.
Curtilage
ROBERT MASON
The bungalows’ owners have larded their lairs with folderols intended to inject personality, but said folderols only emphasise the blandness of the pink-brick, not very elevated elevations. This is ironic, even sad, but unsurprising since most of the folderols have been acquired from the same few shelves in the same few aisles of the local branch of B&Q.
Plants personalise the buildings more successfully, admittedly through concealment rather than enhancement: the larger the plant, and the more of them there are, the better. Trees do the job best of all, especially trees of medium-to-large size, with a low leaf-line that peppers the bungalows’ blandness with broken shade, or comes close to hiding them.
I’m getting a little angry and I don’t want that, so I set the word curtilage trundling around in my head. It’s become one of my favourites over the past few months’ work; I can almost hear it roll, like a prized marble or ball bearing on a polished wooden floor. The sound calms me.
Outside my skull a hot and sulky silence lolls over the neighbourhood, though a reasonably busy road runs only a couple of blocks away. The silence is invisible, of course, but I choose to picture it as a kind of vast, translucent jelly, hovering like some movie mother-ship whose clammy under-parts insinuate themselves into airbricks, letterboxes and drainpipes, and droop between redundant chimney pots. (The wood burner craze hasn’t arrived here yet, current occupants being old enough to remember what a smoky, dusty palaver all of that lugging and cleaning really is. Once they shuffle off, it will be a different story.)
Curtilage, curtilage . . .
The cul-de-sac sees little traffic; I’ve not been here before but it’s familiar from Google Earth. See the faded Saint George’s flag with the phoney wishing well just opposite! Behold the pretentious box hedging, blight-riddled! This is the sort of area whose residents secrete their vehicles inside cloned garages, and the few, parked cars are what you’d expect: practical but affordable, new-ish, and dutifully maintained and waxed. Only one front garden is occupied. An old bloke is prodding at one of the borders with a wasp-striped, long-handled, multi-functional, new-fangled tool, all levers and springs. I have no idea what it is. He looks knackered; the plants look knackered; even the soil does. I nod and half-smile as I pass: when in Rome, and all that. The gardener ignor
es me but his dog growls and stiffens, too lazy/sun-stunned to stand. It’s a Labrador. Well, of course it is. He probably got it in B&-fucking-Q, along with the concrete donkey and its begonia-festooned panniers, and that ridiculous vivid implement, un-lose-able even if you’ve lost your bifocals or, possibly, your sight.
Speakers thump out some temporarily popular drivel and a mustard-coloured Renault Mégane convertible passes, too fast. It’s only three years old but there are duct tape dressings on various hood-wounds and a chunk of the rear bumper’s been sheared off. Since nobody living hereabouts would consider driving under anything other than a solid (practical, affordable, dutifully waxed) roof, this has to be the estate agent. The car slews to a halt about thirty metres ahead, quite near the kerb, opposite the bungalow with the most ostentatious satellite dish and the concrete griffons camping it up on the gateposts – a flourish that manages to be both unusual and utterly predictable. The handbrake is wrenched on and the shitty music stops, leaving a reverberating silence that’s still deeper than before. It’s funny what the parking of a car can tell you about its driver. I know that this one hates his or her job, among other things, and I suspect that he or she is going to hate me.
I think it will be a she.
The door flies open with a screech and the predicted female emerges. She brushes her skirt down and straightens her jacket, testily. Cigarette smoke swirls from the car and I fancy I can spot tiny, abruptly extinguished crochets and quavers tumbling out with it; they drift and fade to nothing along with the fumes. The agent senses my approach and switches on a smile that hasn’t been rehearsed quite enough. She’s applied a generous, liverish layer of slap that’s troublingly close to the paint job on her car; she has perplexing eyebrows, and fag-breath. There’s a button missing from her jacket; I knew there would be. I have no idea how old she is, which probably suits her.
‘Mr—?’
I concur, though she hasn’t said my name. Remiss of her. I could be anyone, possibly even someone worse than the someone I am, which is possible if unlikely. She mouths her moniker, which I forget instantly; shakes my hand as perfunctorily as is possible; ducks back into the car, very arse-aware; and then stands to offer the handful of papers she’s hooked from the passenger seat. Careful to smile more sincerely than she, I refuse them and flourish the details I’ve printed out already. She looks affronted, but nods, and strides on worn kitten heels towards the bungalow. Abruptly she swivels and we almost collide.
‘I’ll let Mr T— show you round. But please bear in mind that he and Mrs T— are quite frail, so be gentle.’
Her words indicate concern, her expression the opposite. I nod, understandingly.
I mean: I do understand. I really do.
There are fuchsias here, rather than begonias, and shabby gnomes providing a midget guard of honour. She jabs (bitten nails, varnish at least a week old and as chipped as the gnome-paint), and the doorbell chimes ‘Greensleeves’. Lace curtains shimmer and the door is opened very slowly, fully forty-nine seconds later: I count them off, in my head.
Mr T—’s clothes are unexceptional but he sports a broad, brown leather belt and striped braces: it seems he’s the cautious type, and much good it seems to have done him. His handshake is firm and his palm calloused. He nods at the agent with dismissive familiarity (the bungalow has been on the market for months) but looks me up and down intently, almost rudely. This alerts me to the probability that Mr T— has eye problems, so I smile broadly, very close up and much more disarmingly than my companion.
Bingo. I should give lessons. Mr T— decides he likes the cut of my jib, and whispers to me from the doorstep, ‘It’s the wife, y’see. Bleedin’ Alzheimer’s. Wouldn’t be movin’ otherwise. We can’t cope, no choice. Thirty-two years in this place. Love it here . . .’
I commiserate, sincerely. I tell him I’m a cash buyer, not so sincerely.
We enter reverently as if into some neglected country church. The immediate throat-catch of damp heightens that notion but only in the second until the heat hits: no country church was ever this warm. It’s hotter than the street. I feel engulfed, slightly stunned, but decide to enjoy it.
We reach the first open door along the hallway, and Mrs T— nods and waves wildly. Her expression encapsulates delight and vacancy; her legs are elephantine and bandaged. She’s enthroned in some complicated invalid chair, tubular and white and stark against the swirling crimson patterns of the carpet that are the only aspect of the room itself that I take in. There are crutches, certainly, and there might be pulleys, oxygen cylinders etc., but I don’t stare. Mr T— tugs at my sleeve, insistent as a Mexican street boy, and as he shepherds me away the agent clucks over the old woman while texting the office and subtly wrinkling her faux-jaundiced nose.
The bungalow is a testament to poverty and sentiment. Throws, ornaments, cushions and doilies attempt to camouflage threadbare sofas and chipped veneer, no more successful in their purpose than those exterior folderols. Cute animal prints slump crookedly in cheap frames that, in turn, sit skew-whiff on floral wallpaper. There is woodchip, there is polystyrene, there is crochet; there are wedding gift relics that should be in a museum, though no museum would want them. A few sepia forebears gawp from foxed mounts with varying degrees of solemnity and/or embarrassment. I make a point of studying these respectfully but not for too long: people can get surprisingly proprietorial and touchy about their dead. More recent likenesses of absent (though, presumably, still living) offspring, awkward in the graduation clobber of obscure polytechnics, stare from bedside cabinets littered with blister packs and liniment tubes. The spattering of black mould crawling up the walls in the bathroom contrasts almost pleasantly with the polychrome anarchy of the rest of the bungalow (it’s hard to get those carpet patterns in Mrs T—’s room out of my head; they were like vortices of scabbed blood). The bath and basin are pink, and the matching, pre-B&-fucking-Q bog has a cast-iron, overhead cistern and a rusting chain. The boiler, a gargantuan, floor-standing hulk, is fit only for scrap; I feel an ironic surge of fury at those uncaring, absent offspring, and calm myself by reaching into my pocket and fingering the Swann Morton retractable scalpel whose new 10A blade, the best for my purpose, is tucked away safely for now.
Curtilage, curtilage . . .
I coo, and Mr T— very nearly permits a glimmer of pleasure to break through the hard-won crust of wariness and fatigue. I can see the change; thousands wouldn’t.
‘Want a look outside?’
‘If it’s not too much trouble.’
We move along a narrow cracked path of concrete slabs, painted the same liver-hue as the carpet whorls, between the kitchen and the garage. It’s roofed over with corrugated plastic sheeting whose grooves are stodgy with moss and whose ridges are Pollocked with bird-shit. I have the feeling such filth is comparatively recent and a source of embarrassment, because Mr T— keeps his gaze fixed on the ground. But his gait is admirable for one so punch-drunk from life: rolling, slightly bandy and giving off no little sense of self-worth. He’s reminiscent of those heavy-arsed toy clowns whose centre of gravity is so low you can’t push them over. Perhaps, he was a sailor. I wouldn’t have wanted to take him on in his prime, or even a decade ago. As for now . . .
I haven’t seen one of those clowns for years.
Emerging into the back garden feels like bursting from a dank pool into clear air: the garden is different. Crimson chrysanths, pom-pom dahlias, and stringy runner beans are hardly to my taste, but the beds occupy a surprisingly large area and tell of skilful passionate industry. It’s only when I look more closely that neglect reveals itself: there are unpicked vegetables and soft fruits rotting on their stalks; tools left out to rust; an under-commitment to deadheading.
Mr T— notices that I’ve noticed.
‘Pride an’ joy, used t’be. Can’t manage no more.’
He clams up and barrels towards the shed; stands aside to usher me i
n. It’s dark, cobwebbed and filled with treasures. Mr T— stays outside and mumbles something else.
‘Sorry. I didn’t catch that.’
‘I SAID I’m goin’ effin’ blind . . .’
The old man starts off almost shouting but then his words curdle and I have to do some more sympathy, albeit from a distance. He turns away to hide tears, peering into whatever shimmering, limited vista remains for him. I perform a brisk inventory of the shed and pocket a pretty, miniature spirit level; then wait, allowing him time to compose himself. (I’ve always liked that phrase, implying as it does that people are somehow akin to songs, melodies, even symphonies. I see myself as something atonal and bracingly abrasive, though still highly organised. I’m not one for improvisation.)
Having allowed a decent, manly interval, I clear my throat and say, ‘Do you mind if I have another wander round inside the house? The layout’s not quite fixed in my head.’
‘Take your time. But I’d better . . .’ He gestures resignedly towards his wife’s room. ‘She’ll be wonderin’ where I am. Mind you, after five minutes she’ll be wonderin’ who I am.’
I watch him toddle off.
A complicated folding rule and a pair of ebony-and-brass dividers disappear inside my coat; then I follow him back under the pigeon-shit canopy and into the house. The agent is mithering away; I hear Mr T— grunting in response. In the kitchen I switch off the freezer, then quietly open a cupboard and remove the lid from a full pot of honey, turning it upside down and placing it on the top shelf before I close the door. There’s no need to open more jars; honey’s great for the job as it has a way of finding its way everywhere, and sticks almost as beautifully as Tate & Lyle’s Golden Syrup. There’s none of the latter here, surprisingly. I put the plug in the sink and turn on the tap, just barely. He’ll find that first and think he did it, might wonder if it’s the first sign that he’s following the missus.
Best British Short Stories 2019 Page 14