Easy Peasy

by Lesley Glaister

  ‘Wanda?’

  Vassily should have told me what to do. I stand, stupidly. My eyes hurt, dry and scratchy. I must look appalling. Stop thinking about yourself.

  ‘Should I call the doctor?’

  She gives no sign of having heard me. I don’t even know if she knows I’m here. Vassily’s feet on the stairs at last. Of course he cannot hear. He zips up his trousers as he pushes past me into the room. I want to creep back to bed but don’t, don’t want to seem heartless.

  ‘Mum, all right, there, there, Mum …’ His voice is loud but gentle, soothing, like a father soothing a child, some fathers. There is the bitter smell of part-excreted alcohol coming off him – and me too I suppose. He tips out a capsule from a pill bottle, scoops her head up in one palm, coaxes her to swallow it with a sip of water, dabs the trickle of water off her chin with the edge of the sheet. Then lies her down again. ‘All right, Mum,’ he says, ‘just hang on in there.’ She lets out a long moan. ‘Morphine,’ he explains to me, ‘takes a while to kick in.’

  ‘I’ll go back to bed,’ I say.

  Wanda waves her hand at me. ‘No … stay.’ I look at Vassily but he shrugs. It is so cold in the room, if I’m going to stay there is nothing to be done but to get into bed with her.

  ‘OK.’

  The mattress tilts with my weight, so much greater than hers though I am not big. The pillow smells slightly of man, or maybe it’s my imagination, the thought of Stan beside her. I cannot help but wonder: do they still make love? Her poor body, thin and swollen at once, could it bear such use? We lie together in the lamp-light. I listen to her breathing, little hard, tight breaths that at last begin to loosen. I wonder if she has forgotten I’m here, whether she’ll drift back to sleep now, but she hasn’t forgotten a thing. She looks over at me, her eyes bright.

  ‘Better?’ I say, stupid as ever.

  She struggles to sit up. I get out of bed and help, plump the pillows behind her. She reaches for the glass of water by the bed, takes tiny sips, her hand trembling. The skin is papery thin, in the yellowish lamplight you can see the green and ivory of vein and bone, you can see her workings.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she says.

  ‘Sorry!’ I sit down on the edge of her bed and take the thin hand.

  ‘For waking you.’

  ‘Don’t be silly.’ I smooth the tissue of skin, one of her orange nails has gone, the bed of it raw and caked with curds of glue. ‘I never sleep.’

  ‘You and Vass been chewing the fat?’ The gleam in her eye is almost mischievous. I wonder what she thinks? Her hand goes to her head. I help her straighten her scarf.

  Vassily comes up the stairs, puts his head round the door. ‘I’m getting off soon,’ he says. ‘I’ll make a cup of tea before I go. Anyone?’

  ‘Please,’ I say.

  ‘What I fancy,’ Wanda says, ‘is a proper cup of PG Tips or what have you. Proper tea. None of that herbal slop.’

  ‘Right you are.’ Vassily goes downstairs. I look at Wanda’s clock – three-fifteen.

  ‘Shall I tidy you up, start again …?’ for the scarf is still lop-sided. She nods and tilts her head towards me. I slide the scarf off the faintly bristly skin of her scalp, undo the knot, smooth it with my hands. To my surprise I feel almost content. In what? In being in a house full of people wide awake in the dead of the night, the worst hour of the night, the hour too far from the shore of evening or the shore of morning, the drowning hour. I would feel content if the whisky was not a dirty taste in my mouth, a burn in my throat. I long for the tea. My eyes sting, my temples throb.

  I fold the scarf round her head and tie it, a cotton paisley scarf, brown and yellow. The skin at the nape of her neck is fine and soft as silk, softer. I tie the knot flat so that it won’t dig into her when she lies down again. Her make-up is smeared and clogged into the lines around her eyes. On her dressing-table is cleanser and cotton wool. I pour some cleanser on a ball of cotton wool, fresh smelling cucumber stuff, and I wipe it over her cheeks and round her lips, scoop gently under each eye, smooth it over her forehead.

  ‘That’s beautiful,’ she breathes, her eyes closed. ‘I always said I wanted a girl.’ She opens her eyes a slit and smiles at me, ‘A boy would never think of doing this … not that my Vass int an angel.’

  ‘He’s very good.’

  ‘And I’ve got a daughter-in-law now – and a grand-daughter. Oh she’s that bright.’ She looks past me into her grand-daughter’s bright future, into her own oblivion, and her eyes cloud.

  ‘How about some perfume?’

  ‘Don’t bother much with that any more.’ She lifts her index finger to the corner of her eye, presses, as if forcing a tear back in.

  ‘No?’

  ‘That seem to make me feel queasy.’

  ‘I’ve got some eau-de-Cologne in my bag, that’s refreshing.’

  I fetch it, dab a little on her temples, her thin beating wrists. I straighten the covers, rearrange her pillows. Feel a little seep of satisfaction – I’ve made her more comfortable, I’ve given her ease. A feeling inside me like a small ripening. It strikes me I’ve never done this before, this motherly thing, looked after a person in such a tender thoughtful way. Maybe with Huwie, a long long time ago, but never since. It’s Foxy who looks after me – mostly it’s that way round. I had never thought.

  ‘I’ll go down and help Vassily with the tea.’

  She nods. She looks tidy, composed, almost childlike, her skin sheeny in the light from the lamp.

  He drops a couple of tea-bags into the pot.

  ‘What would have happened if no one was there?’ I say.

  ‘Stan is here mostly. If not I try and come – she rarely has a night alone. She doesn’t wake like that every night.’

  ‘But what if?’

  He shrugs.

  ‘How long?’ I ask, but his head is bent over the tea-pot. ‘Months, weeks, what?’

  ‘Sugar?’ he says.

  7

  Five o’clock, back in bed, Vassily gone. I won’t see him again. Unless, possibly, at Wanda’s funeral – if I’m asked. Hearing the door slam behind him, I felt lost for a moment, found my hands were grasping at the empty air.

  I want him to like me – but he does not. Why should he? Once he wanted me to like him. Oh, why do I care?

  I stayed in bed beside Wanda until she fell asleep again, her breath inflating her lips, escaping in little puffs. I edged out of her bed, carefully, carefully, so as not to wake her and crept back into this cold room, drank water, swallowed a couple of paracetamol from my bag. It’s not so bad – the far side of the night. I can be alone. The lorry noise has never ceased but I am starting not to hear it, not to hear every separate vehicle that thunders past. Closing my eyes I imagine the faces of the men, mostly men, high up in their cabs, radios blaring, sandwiches and fags on the dashboard, eyes eating the road, minds on their wives or their children or lovers, on whatever makes them feel at home.

  I said a last good-bye to Vassily, once before, when we were children. I hadn’t seen him since the ants, or only in the distance at school. For the last couple of weeks of the half-term, I was ill, said I was, I think I was, with a dull hard ache in my stomach as if I had swallowed a stone. I could hardly eat. The doctor found nothing wrong, but because we were moving and starting a new school anyway after the Whitsun holiday, Mummy let me stay at home.

  My eleventh birthday had been in the time between the ants and the move, a horrible birthday. Hazel and I were still half in disgrace so there was no party. Mummy took us to see Oliver and then for a posh tea in a hotel – minute sandwiches and fragile cakes off a china stand. I didn’t think it was much of a feed but didn’t dare complain. I’d had clothes and a watch and a Spirograph. I’d wanted a chemistry set but Daddy had said, No, giving no reason but looking at me as if he thought I was too dangerous for a chemistry set. I had enjoyed Oliver – but the birthday had been all wrong and sour. Hazel had come into my room at bedtime and said, ‘Bad luck, old bean.�
� ‘Thanks, old bean,’ I’d said, comforted that she understood. ‘Good-night.’

  The day we moved: a heat-wave – temperatures in the eighties and the air stifling with the scent of wallflowers and creosote. The removal men stamped and shouted brutishly through the house in their string vests, sweat trickling down their faces. There was banging as they heaved boxes of our belongings and furniture into the van, the roar of the vacuum cleaner in empty rooms, shuddery sounds as the metal sides of the van vibrated. The house filled with the smell of the men’s sweat and cigarette smoke. Hazel and I were taking turns – an hour each – keeping Huw out from under everyone’s feet and helping Mummy clean each room as it was emptied.

  I took Huwie out into the garden, my eyes averted from Vassily’s window in case he was behind it, looking down. Huwie had refused to wear a T-shirt and his tender shoulders were pink from the sun. He had scribbled on his tummy with a Biro and was very proud of the result. We peered into the pond. ‘Look, Huwie,’ I said, ‘a frog.’ It was the first. The first tadpole to do the whole thing: lose its tail, grow legs, lose its gills, grow lungs; become nothing but a frog. ‘Fog,’ Huwie said lying on his belly and making a grab for it, but the frog swam to the far side of the pool, its splayed legs scissoring it away in rippling surges. A frog the size of my thumbnail. The most perfect thing I’d ever seen. We’d done diagrams at school, the metamorphosis from sticky blob to frog, smudgy black pencil on sugar paper. But we had not drawn the wonder of it. I had not understood. Huwie tried to get in the pond and I carried him away into the cool and strangely echoey house.

  ‘The men have almost finished, Grizzle,’ Mummy said. ‘Daddy’s loading the car. Will you take that book back to Vassily?’ she nods at a curled-up reading book lying on the draining-board. ‘I found it down the back of the sofa – and you can say good-bye to them.’

  ‘Why don’t you?’

  ‘Just do it – we haven’t got long.’

  ‘Hazel?’ I looked at her pleadingly.

  ‘I saw them yesterday,’ she said, tossing her tidy head.

  ‘Don’t be long though,’ Mummy said. She was emptying the vacuum cleaner into a bin bag, blinking and pursing her lips against a rising cloud of dust.

  I walked round the corner. It was five o’clock, still blazing hot. The air was still and golden, almost syrupy with the sweetness of heated grass and flowers. I dragged my feet and stuck my bottom lip out. I felt about five. My shorts were too short and tight and my blouse was dirty, but all the clean clothes were packed. Away in the distance I could hear the Brahms’s Lullaby jingle of an ice-cream van.

  The garden in front of Wanda’s flat was overgrown. The old pram was still there but grass had grown up around it and bindweed twined round the hood. Dandelions and their fluffy clocks grew up the sides of the path. I kicked one and a cloud of fairies bloomed up into the air. By the door a cluster of cloudy milk-bottles stank sourly.

  I went up the stairs and knocked at Wanda’s door. No answer. Relieved. I started to turn away but then I heard movement inside. The handle turned and Vassily’s face appeared in the gap. I understood then that a smile need not be friendly. He was not wearing his hearing-aids and his hair hung in his eyes. He did not ask me in.

  ‘I’ve brought this back,’ I said loudly, holding out the book. Wanda appeared suddenly behind him, wrenching open the door with one hand, holding her dressing-gown together with the other.

  ‘Thanks.’ She took the book and gestured me inside. ‘You off then?’ I entered reluctantly and stood in the hall. On top of the incense scent and patchouli oil I could smell bubble-bath. Wanda’s hair was wet around the bottom, the fuzz turned to solid darkish curls. She hugged me against her velvety dressing-gown, overwhelming me with softness.

  ‘Thanks,’ she said.

  I disengaged myself. ‘For what?’

  ‘For playing with my Vass.’

  ‘That’s all right.’ I looked at the floor. Was she serious?

  ‘You look boiled,’ she said, ‘have a drink.’

  I was tempted. Everything nice had been packed away in boxes at home and we’d only been able to have water since lunchtime. She gave me a coke, the bottle misted and icy from the fridge. ‘Vass?’ He shook his head. I drank it as fast as I could, the bubbles hard as grit as I swallowed them, my teeth turning soft and furry.

  ‘Thank you,’ I said.

  ‘I’m that choked you’re going.’ She did look sorry. Obviously she did not really know me. She put one arm round me, one round Vassily, and hugged us both so that he and I were almost pressed together. ‘Do keep in touch,’ she said.

  When I left I had to run up and down the road shaking my arms and legs to get rid of a mass of horrible creeping twitches. I don’t know what it was. The sweat under my arms was smelling horrible, it had just started to do that, a grown-up complicated smell and wisps of hair were growing there too, so that I had to keep my arms down if I was wearing anything sleeveless.

  ‘Whatever are you doing?’ Mummy called. She was standing by the car holding Huw. The van had gone. It was time for us to go. I climbed into the back of the car. The hot seat burnt the backs of my thighs. The car was cramped, crammed with the five of us and pot-plants and my father’s bad temper.

  I had a rubber-plant on my lap and was squashed up against Hazel who wriggled irritably but dared say nothing because of the colour of Daddy’s neck. All I could hope was that she wouldn’t be sick. The windows were wide open and as we drove away Mummy called out, ‘Good-bye house, Good-bye The Nook’, and Huwie, sitting on her lap, waved and called ‘Bye-bye’ too. But I, my face hidden by the thick rubbery leaves, did not even look back.

  8

  The air in the room is thick and frowsty. I approach the bed warily with Wanda’s tea. She is absolutely still. My heart is a stiff wing against my ribs. It is the only movement in the room. I am frozen mid-way through a step. Outside, a lull between lorries lets in the regular high chink-chink of a sparrow.

  Then Wanda opens her eyes, two bright slits, and I breathe again. I put down the cup of tea, dizzied by a hot rush of relief. She tries to raise her head from the pillow to squint at the clock.

  ‘Eight-thirty,’ I say. ‘I looked in before but you were asleep.’

  I do not say that she was so sound asleep I was afraid then that she had gone. That I had crept downstairs, taken more pills for my pounding head, drunk my way through a pot of tea, crouching by the electric-fire, terrified, trying to distract myself with breakfast television. Telling myself not to be silly, that she was not dead but only sound asleep, deeply, deeply asleep. But hearing in my head at the same time, the granite grave-stone words: she is not dead but sleepeth. Crossing my arms across my chest, clutching myself, rocking, clutched by the fear that I was alone in a house with a dead person and that it was up to me to do the things that must be done, things I had only seen in films or on television, had only the haziest idea about – to bend over Wanda’s body, to feel for her pulse, lift her eyelids, to touch her chilly skin. To hold a mirror to her face to check for breath.

  I made her tea in defiance of all that – and I am proved right to have done so. She is alive, and now her eyes are opening wider and she is smiling at me. She is alive for today – and how precious life seems suddenly, how precious and precarious. If only there was a God I would give thanks.

  I turn my face away to hide my expression which must be crazed with relief. I open her curtains to let the grey light in. Sea-link, Geest, Ferrymaster, say the sides of the passing lorries. ‘How about a bath?’ I say.

  There is a spider in the bath, a big palm-sized crouching one. At home I would ask Foxy to remove it. Not that I’m scared of spiders, not at all, it’s just touching it … just the idea that it might run up my arm, up my sleeve. Too big to wash down the plug-hole. There is a plastic beaker by the sink, opaque with toothpaste splashes. I nudge the spider inside it with the end of a tooth-brush, stuff a handful of toilet paper in, not tight enough to kill it, just to trap it w
hile I take it downstairs. On the back steps I pull out the wad of paper, the spider clinging to it, fling it as far as I can, slam the door and run back upstairs. It’s not that I’m frightened of spiders – what is there to be frightened of? It’s just that they are so delicate, so fragile, I do not want to do them any harm.

  I want this bath to be lovely for Wanda. I wipe the bath which is none too clean, put in the plug, turn on the taps, slosh in some bath-oil. The smell of roses fills the room. I am reminded of Foxy running me a bath, six months ago, the morning after my father died. Foxy bringing me breakfast in bed after that terrible night, caring for me so well. I light the blue candle on the edge of the bath. The cold air fills with scented steam. The radiator is hardly warm. I take the towels downstairs and hang them over chairs in front of the fire.

  Wanda is sitting on the edge of the bed when I go in. ‘Ready for me?’

  ‘It’s chilly in the bathroom,’ I warn, suddenly anxious. I don’t know anything about nursing, whether this is the wrong thing, whether she’ll catch cold. I don’t want to make her worse. Her hand on the landing wall, steadying herself, I hover behind her. I don’t know how much help she needs, whether to let her be private, but she starts to take off her nightdress with no embarrassment. I help her slip it over her head and untie the scarf. Her body is so changed I want to look away but she is watching my face so I only look into her eyes and smile.

  ‘Always fancied being thin …’ Her smile is rueful and invites me to look. Her flesh is yellowish in the candlelight and clutches her bones. Her breasts have pleated themselves against her but her belly is swollen. Her pubic hair has gone and the blunt white place looks so vulnerable I want to moan. I bat away the thought of my father. I hold her arm and she steps into the bath, eases herself down into the water.

  ‘Not too hot …?’

  ‘Ahhh … that’s bliss,’ she breathes, her eyes closing. I can almost feel her pleasure. The candlelight is grainy in the steam. Condensation trickles down the cold window glass but the scent of the bath-oil and the candle have almost masked the smell of sickness and of damp.