Easy Peasy

by Lesley Glaister

  ‘Mum?’ Vassily reaches out to touch her but she waves him away. I notice again the loose rings on her fingers, the way the stone in her engagement ring has slipped round out of sight. I remember the puzzle ring she gave me that I kept for years but have no more, the too-big feel of it on my middle finger.

  Vassily and I go downstairs. He takes off his coat and slings it over the back of a chair. He sighs. ‘She hardly eats a thing.’ I want to smooth the coat and stroke it. How can he be so casual with anything so beautiful? All his clothes are beautiful. Some might say that he was.

  Oh Foxy, Foxy, Foxy.

  ‘Your sweater,’ I say, looking down at myself, ‘your mum said …’ But he is indifferent. A lorry roars past. He goes to the window, looks out, turns and stands with his back to it, looking too big, out of kilter with the scale of the room. He is as ill at ease as I am. ‘I was going to stay the night … but …’ I sit down on the sofa, smooth my skirt over my knees. ‘But now you’re here and I’ve seen Wanda maybe I’ll …’

  He watches me speak, then, ‘No, don’t go. Don’t disappoint her.’

  ‘Vassily?’

  He waits for my question.

  ‘She’s … dying isn’t she?’

  He pauses. He runs a hand down his throat, I fancy I hear the faint rasp of bristles, or maybe I imagine the feel of them. I watch the movement in his throat as he swallows. ‘Yes.’

  ‘But she was alone!’

  He shakes his head. ‘She won’t have anyone to stay … Stan’s here mostly. A Macmillan nurse comes every week and the district nurse most days. If Stan’s away I try and come. She doesn’t want to be a burden, she says. I know,’ he finishes defensively, reading, wrongly, criticism into my look, ‘I know it’s not ideal but …’ He spreads his hands.

  ‘She doesn’t seem too … down,’ I say.

  ‘She’s amazing, Mum.’

  ‘How long?’

  He looks away. I don’t know if he heard the question, if he saw my lips. There is a pause that is too long. Another lorry grinds its gears and roars. I can smell exhaust fumes.

  ‘I don’t know how she stands that …’ I say and flinch, realising that, probably, he can’t hear.

  ‘It’s surprising what you can stand,’ he says, and I don’t know what he means, what he’s thinking of or remembering. Or whether he means anything at all.

  ‘I’ll find a guest-house,’ I say, ‘something on the front maybe. Where I can hear the sea.’ Shit. I’ve done it again. What is the matter with me? ‘I’ll come back tomorrow. There’s not room for both of us.’

  ‘This house not big enough for the two of us?’ He surprises me. I blush, a hot and childish buzz of blood in my cheeks. ‘My mother will be hurt if you don’t stay. And …’ he hesitates.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Drink?’ He reaches for his brief-case, opens it and brings out some groceries and a bottle of Famous Grouse.

  ‘Colin was most annoyed that I opened his Glenmorangie … at Christmas.’

  ‘Colin?’

  ‘Hazel’s …’

  ‘Aaah.’

  ‘Va-ass.’ Wanda’s voice, panicky from upstairs.

  I indicate the ceiling: ‘Your mum …’

  Vassily smashes down the bottle and takes the stairs two or three at a time. Again, such love. I hear their voices, his feet above me, water running in the bathroom. I shiver; despite the heating, the fire, it is still cold. I switch the second bar of the fire on, catch my reflection in the mirror: a mess. I roll my fat cool curls round my fingers, take lipstick from my bag and re-do my lips. Wish I hadn’t, in the bleak electric light it looks too harsh, the edges hard.

  I don’t want to be here, on a cold February night in a small house with a dying woman and with a man I hardly know. But who knows the worst of me. It was only a game. Children get up to all sorts. They don’t know what they do. I scrub the lipstick off on a tissue and pinch my cheeks for colour.

  Vassily comes down and into the kitchen. I go through. He’s brought the tray down, the food is almost untouched. The silly yellow egg congealed in its bowl.

  ‘She’s had her pain-killers,’ he says. ‘She’ll sleep now.’

  I watch him tip the egg, a solid heavy shape, into the bin then pause, his foot on the pedal, the plate of toast poised above it. ‘Unless you want this?’

  ‘No.’

  Is he serious? How can I eat the food she could not eat, old toast gone cold and stiff? Although I am hungry. Maybe he reads my mind.

  ‘I’m going to make myself some grub.’ He slits open the Cellophane of a packet of pasta shells. ‘Want some?’

  ‘Well … yes.’ Unwilling to accept, unwilling to stay. I want to go out and walk on the sea-front, fill my lungs with cold clean air that has come straight from the sea, unbreathed, salty air. Wanda’s house smells … not unpleasant exactly, except for the traffic fumes but there is a sort of dampish sweetish ill smell. What happened to the joss-sticks? I am uneasy with Vassily, awkward and ashamed. And I want Foxy. I would put up with anything, I think now, anything if I could be with her, now, at home, her arms around me. I want Foxy.

  No, you can’t.

  ‘Pour a couple of whiskies will you?’

  I take two glasses from the draining-board and splosh in the whisky, too much I expect, I never know how much is right. I take a gulp and feel it in my head before it even touches my stomach. Because I am empty and not just empty of food.

  I sit by the fire with my drink, watching the bulb flickering behind the dusty plastic coals. I touch them and they are hardly warm. For decoration only, created to give the illusion of warmth. The heat comes from the coiled orange bars above. I can hear Vassily in the kitchen, clattering about as he cooks, the little grunts and sighs he doesn’t know he’s making. He did that as a child, made noises when he bent over his books at school, when he did anything that required concentration. The sudden sizzle of onion, the pungence of garlic.

  Legs folded backwards and forwards.

  Daddy pushing, pushing.

  Up in the air and over the wall.

  Daddy headless on a ladder.

  No.

  Up in the air so blue.

  The lurch of the tree-house when you were in it and someone climbed up.

  Oh I do think it’s the pleasantest thing

  Ever a child can do.

  ‘Here we are.’

  I start as Vassily comes in with two plates of pasta and mushrooms. It smells divine. We sit side by side on the sofa, plates on our knees.

  ‘I’ve got some wine,’ I say.

  ‘Good.’

  Red wine, blue-red in this light. As we eat we talk about food. A safe topic. I don’t speak of Foxy but he mentions his wife Caroline several times, and the difficulty of coaxing their daughter to eat anything except sausages and Battenberg cake. ‘First she peels off the marzipan and rolls it into a ball. Then she separates the squares, builds a tower, knocks it down, eats the white squares, then the pink squares, then the marzipan.’ He is proud of this infant eccentricity. I don’t ask why they give her Battenberg instead of healthy food. I’m sure it’s not that simple. I don’t pretend to understand children. The pasta is delicious, lots of garlic, torn basil leaves, black pepper, slivers of fried mushroom. We’re drinking the wine too fast. Vassily’s lips are stained blue.

  When we’ve finished eating he shows me photographs: Caroline and little Naomi. ‘Don’t say she looks like me because she doesn’t.’ He has a shred of basil caught between his front teeth.

  ‘What about you?’ he asks.

  ‘What about me?’

  ‘Not married?’

  ‘No. I was engaged once … but it didn’t work out.’

  ‘And now?’

  ‘Alone.’ I feel Foxy’s fingernail dragging down my spine. Well, it’s true isn’t it? From now on, probably, I am alone.

  He waits for elaboration but I offer none.

  ‘Huw?’

  ‘Oh, a string of girlfriends, can’t see hi
m settling down for a while. If ever. Hazel’s the only one who’s settled and she …’ has settled down too easily, I want to say, has attached herself to safety. Colin is safety, as far as a man can ever be. But I don’t say.

  And silence. Too long.

  What’s wrong with safety? Who the hell am I to mock?

  ‘Well I’m glad Wanda’s married. He looks nice.’ I nod towards the wedding photograph.

  ‘Stan the man.’ Vassily slides his index finger round inside the collar of his shirt, a soft pale blue shirt under a soft pale grey sweater. I wonder if he chooses his own clothes or whether it’s Caroline who has such exquisite taste. ‘He’s a good bloke,’ he says. ‘Mum likes him, that’s what counts.’

  ‘And you?’

  ‘She’s happy.’

  If I am not going to go tonight, there’s something we have to break through. There is a membrane between this small talk and the real things we could say to each other. The real things I feel compelled to say, at least. It is only nine-thirty. I can’t politely go to bed for at least an hour. But how can we go on spinning out this meaningless conversation for another hour? I can’t. If we don’t say something real I will have to go.

  I want to be on the promenade under the bleaching lights, walking fast and hard. I want to jump on the shifting shingle and run to the lip of the sea and hear it breathe, smell it, feel it. No. Liar. I want to go into the phone box by the pier and ring Foxy and tell her … I don’t know what. I want to hear her voice so badly that I ache. But I don’t want to hear anything she might say.

  A long silence. Vassily holds the wine bottle up to the light – empty. He unscrews the whisky, looks at me, I hesitate, then nod.

  ‘I didn’t know until today …’ I say in a rush. Too fast, he leans towards me to catch my words. ‘I didn’t know until today that…’ the words have turned to pebbles in my mouth. ‘That your Mum … that Wanda was a …’ I cannot say it.

  ‘Prostitute?’ His eyebrows are raised.

  I try to breathe in but the pebbles are banked up in my chest and throat. Where I was empty now I am full of hard, heavy words, so heavy I can hardly move.

  ‘You didn’t know?’ He watches my eyes as if to catch a lie. He doesn’t believe me. ‘What did you think she did then?’

  ‘I don’t know. I didn’t think. She was just your mother.’

  ‘Money has to come from somewhere.’

  ‘I didn’t think.’

  ‘No.’ I don’t like the way he emphasises this negative, the sour little shake of his head.

  A gulp of whisky goes down the wrong way. I choke and splutter. He doesn’t pat my back like Foxy would. He sits and watches, coolly he waits. I struggle to regain control, feeling, oh feeling such a fool. ‘And that my dad …’

  ‘Sorry?’ He leans towards me.

  ‘My dad,’ I repeat.

  He nods, then: ‘I thought that was why you hated me.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because my mother was a whore … and because of her and Ralph.’

  I sort of laugh. ‘I didn’t know what a whore was!’ Too late I realise that I should have said I didn’t hate him. I can’t say it now, a beat too late. And was it even true? I can’t remember. The little spook looks down at me from his frame on the mantelpiece. Yellow, cheesy wedge of a face.

  I wonder what Foxy is doing? If I rang she might not answer and that would mean that either she is out or that she has unplugged the phone. If I rang and there was no answer I would feel worse.

  ‘I loved him,’ Vassily says. ‘And so did Mum.’

  ‘Yes.’ Can I say the same?

  He leans back, stretches his legs, then bends forward and unties his shoe-laces. I curl up on the sofa, my feet, that are still cold, tucked underneath me. Superficially, he looks relaxed but his hands are clenched and there is a little tic in the muscle above his jaw.

  ‘I used to …’ I begin. I’m not quite drunk enough to break through this. Vassily pours more whisky. As he does so he catches my eye as if he understands and will force me through. I am almost scared. Amazing that words that are nothing but air and vibration can be so hard. Words evaporate once they are spoken but their meanings can scorch very deep into your tender soul. Sticks and stones might break my bones but words will never hurt me. What a lie.

  ‘Go on.’ It is unnerving, the intensity with which he waits and watches. I take another swallow of the whisky. It is like a game of dares. Elaine and I used to play dares sometimes with some wild girls I wasn’t supposed to play with. I dare you to cross the railway track. I dare you to steal a packet of Love-hearts from the shop. I dare you to kiss Puddle-duck. No one ever said that – but they might have done.

  ‘I used to be very jealous of you.’ I wait for his surprise.

  ‘Go on,’ is all that he says.

  ‘How Daddy seemed … almost to prefer you.’ He watches me closely but I cannot read his expression. I wind my hair round my finger. ‘How he cared about your feelings and not ours, mine and Hazel’s. How he hardly even noticed Huw.’

  The light is too bright in my eyes. The single central light-bulb under its pleated shade casts a bleak uniform light. Keeping my face tilted so he can see my mouth dazzles me. I feel a little lurch inside that warns me I should drink no more. Vassily keeps his eyes on my face. He communicates so well I keep forgetting that he needs to watch my lips.

  ‘The pond …’ I want to rid myself of the pebbles that shift and grind in my chest. What ever can it matter now? I am thinking of the ants. He must forgive me.

  ‘The pond and how … it was your pond and his pond and …’ I am starting to sound childish. I laugh a bit, a brittle laugh that snaps off halfway through. Daddy’s hand over his little hand patting the beautiful white sand flat. He doesn’t laugh. Inscrutable, that’s what he is. ‘Even when Hazel and I went to get the pond-weed it didn’t work … and you helped him make it.’ Christ, I am not going to cry. I gulp more whisky, blushing and squirming under his cool gaze as if I’m on the end of a pin, or pinioned underneath his foot. The more I say the stupider I sound. And the less honest. Although I am trying to be honest.

  ‘I feel as if …’ But I am stuck. His green eyes are clear and cold.

  ‘As if …’ he prompts.

  Something occurs to me. ‘Tell me … after we moved away did you see him again, my father?’

  ‘Of course.’ He looks surprised.

  My feet are cramped underneath me. I uncurl. ‘I … I had no idea.’

  He shrugs. ‘That’s how it was.’

  A swelling sensation, the germ of what I knew expanding in my chest, a wait while it does so. ‘When?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Did you see him?’

  He looks at me as if at an idiot. ‘Evenings, weekends. Summer holidays.’ My nails are in my palms. I close my eyes, think. Yes, he was often away: work, golf trips. We didn’t miss him. The rhythms of the house so much easier, the atmosphere lighter in his absence. I never thought about where he was. I feel betrayed. Betrayed? Me? Why? Did it hurt me? The swelling in my rib-cage and throat has grown so great I’m almost choked. I gasp in a big breath. The electric-fire is baking the stale air. ‘Mind if I open the window?’

  I’ve got pins and needles in my foot. I get up and stamp it on the floor, wincing against the excruciating fizz. Behind the curtains is a blur of wet orange light, glittering drops on the glass, the movement of a dark tree. I didn’t know it had been raining.

  ‘Won’t open,’ Vassily says. ‘Painted solid.’

  ‘But I can’t breathe.’

  He shrugs his shoulders.

  ‘I’ll go in the kitchen.’ Walking about makes me realise how much too much I’ve drunk. I’m clumsy as if wearing giant boots and boxing gloves. I go upstairs to the bathroom, moving quietly as I can so as not to disturb Wanda. The bathroom is cool at least, the shelves crammed with medicine bottles, pills, essential oils; the turquoise plastic bath smeary. A thick blue candle is stuck to the side of the bath in
a solidified cascade of drips. No possibility of opening this window either, sealed up with a sheet of polythene taped to the frame, inside a scatter of dead flies, the skeleton of a lace-wing. I will suffocate.

  Downstairs, I reach for my coat. ‘I’m going to get some fresh air.’

  ‘It’s pouring with rain.’

  ‘Just five minutes.’

  He looks as if he couldn’t care less, which, probably, he couldn’t. I go out into the icy streaming night. As usual, I’m wearing stupid shoes for walking, low-heeled – but they pinch my toes. Sleet smashes from the sky and jumps halfway up my legs. I’ve no umbrella and no hood. Cold needles prickle my skull, my hair will be ruined. In my hurry to escape I’ve turned the wrong way, I have to walk along the muddy edge of the dual carriageway before turning into quieter streets. The juggernauts thunder through the wet orange and black and send sheets of freezing oily water, waves of it, sloshing up from the gutter, soaking me to the waist. It’s only fifty yards or so to the corner – but I turn back. Too vain to ruin my hair? Too cold and wet to think? You cannot breathe in such rain.

  5

  Vassily smirks when I burst back in. He regards my soaking skirt and the gritty wetness of my stockings. ‘I’ll get something of Mum’s.’

  He runs upstairs and brings down a pair of tie-dyed leggings and a sweat-shirt.

  ‘I’ll change upstairs.’

  ‘Stay by the fire. I’ll do the washing up.’ He takes the plates out into the kitchen. My fingers feel huge and they are trembling as I fumble with the buttons of my dress, undo my stockings, laddered, the thin nylon stuck to me, the sensation like peeling off the top layer of skin. My legs are red and blotchy as salami. Wanda’s clothes smell of a sickly fabric conditioner, not my sort of clothes at all, but soft and dry. The mirror shows me that my curls have gone, the wetness frizzing my hair into its old bushiness. My nipples are screwed up tightly with the cold, they hurt as if someone is pinching them between their fingers and thumbs, not a loving squeeze, spiteful. Dog-belly’s nipples in my mind now. Does he still have them? Of course, he must. Dog-belly. What did I used to say running along to school … Dog-belly, Puddle-duck, Puddle-belly, Dog’s muck.