Love in a Mist

by Sarah Harrison

  ‘All right – thank you.’

  ‘Au revoir then, Nico. All the best.’

  Nico. No-one else called him that. It was her name for him.

  Watching her walk away he felt bereft – smaller somehow, and cold. He hardly knew her, and yet she had seemed on some instinctive level to know him, and that had been, well – fantastic. He waited until she reached her house; she must have known he was still there because she waved before going in.

  He heard the shouting as he walked up the path. Nothing unusual in that, but it prompted the familiar misery and dread. And the physical reaction, too – queasiness, and a shuddering through all his muscles as he tensed for what was to come.

  Before he even reached the front door it flew open and his father appeared, dragging his jacket up one arm and snarling over his shoulder.

  ‘Fucking mad bitch! I’m off, I’m going, you can sort this one out yourself! Stinking bitch!’

  But she was on him, wearing that flat, stony expression that Nick most dreaded, grabbing Billy’s hair with both hands and pulling him back into the hall, ramming his head against the wall. Nick heard his father scream with pain, he raised a knee and jerked it into her stomach. Nick leapt inside and closed the door after him. This must never be seen! Never guessed at – especially by her!

  ‘Stop it, please – come on! Both of you, please!’

  The kick had made her step back; she turned her cold eyes on Nick like a searchlight. Billy staggered away from the wall. His hard, red face was wet with snot, sweat, saliva, and furious tears of shame and pain, his teeth bared in a grimace.

  ‘Don’t take it, don’t take it from her, son! Get the hell out, that’s what I’m going to do! She’ll kill someone soon and it’s not going to be me. Ah!’ She lunged at him, her arm darting like a striking snake at his eyes, but this time he was too quick and was out of the door, crashing it shut so violently that it seemed to bounce on its hinges.

  Nick knew the drill, he knew what he had to do. The only sound in the hall now was her breathing – the hiss in, and the thick rustle out … She stood perfectly still now, looking at him as though trying to make out who, or what, he was.

  ‘Hello Mum.’

  He stepped forward and kissed her cheek, the skin clammy, the flesh beneath solid and fish-like, sour-smelling under his lips. Remembering Mrs Mayfield’s breast warm against his arm, and her elegant foot reaching for the shoe, he had to stifle a sob – like the outsiders, she mustn’t hear, she mustn’t ever guess. He kept his voice very low, and even.

  ‘Come on. I’m going to make us some toast.’

  He walked away from her, down the hall to the kitchen. There was a conservatory across the whole width of the house at the back, but its peeling paint and smeary glass edged with mould afforded little extra light. Slimy blackened leaves spotted the roof, and the floor with its khaki cushioned lino (it reminded Nick of the skin of some giant amphibian) was barely visible under the piles of rubbish. Not junk – not the friendly disorganized clutter of a home – but the disgusting banked-up detritus of desperation: broken boxes, damp newspaper, rags and stained cloths and bedding, broken china, much of it crusted with food, filthy bits of clothing, some stiff and twisted with bodily dirt, books ripped and gaping, an ancient hamster cage (he remembered the hamster episode as if it were yesterday) the saturated sawdust rank with droppings and pellets. The droppings were relatively fresh: at night the conservatory twitched and rustled with mice.

  The kitchen, or what passed for the kitchen, was against the wall, as if huddling away from the banked-up rubbish, but it wasn’t much better. The stove was black with hardened grease, the fridge iced-up and freckled with mildew because it was impossible fully to close. There was one large cupboard with a lop-sided door, and a bookcase on which stood tins, open packets, and butter and speckled dripping in bowls. A sink with a cracked plastic draining board (both overflowing) was in the corner near the door.

  The toaster and the sliced loaf stood on a yellow Formica table next to the shelves. Nick put in a couple of slices, took down butter and jam and rescued a couple of plates from the sticky landslide in the sink.

  There was no movement in the hall. He knew she’d be standing in the same place, her desolate blank moon of a face turned his way. Outside his father, free but still fulminating, would be closing on the Wellington Arms, preparing to dive into several hours of oblivion, no doubt already re-casting himself as some kind of noble carer sticking by his troubled wife because that was what a decent husband should do. Which, to be fair, he did.

  All this was pretty routine to Nick, as he stood waiting for the toast to pop up. But things were about to change, he reminded himself. Tomorrow he’d go to Dawson’s and say he was ready to start whenever they wanted him. The process of escape would have begun.

  The toast popped up.

  He spread the two slices with butter and the peculiar pink, jelly-like jam that advertised itself as raspberry but bore no relation to any known fruit. Then he carried them out of the kitchen and into the sitting room, knowing she would follow.

  ‘You sit down,’ he said. ‘Sit down and eat your toast.’

  Obedient now, she lowered herself heavily into the brown velour armchair. A hint of colour showed in her sallow cheeks, her breathing was no longer audible. Her eyes took in the toast, her hands reached for the plate. The small familiar ritual was already working. By tiny increments, nanoseconds, his mother was returning to herself.

  It hadn’t always been so bad. Nick could remember a time when his father got up from the breakfast table and went to work in a suit like a father in a Ladybird book, and his mother helped him get ready and walked him to school, and even passed the time of day with other mothers at the school gate. He hadn’t appreciated it at the time, but she’d been a striking woman. Old snapshots showed her like an Amazon princess, statuesque, with big, sculpted, uncompromising features and fierce deep-set eyes like coals in a hearth, her coarse shock of red-brown curly hair trapped by two combs above her ears, then springing out in an enormous bush that waved and bounced behind her head as she walked. In those first years of school he didn’t reflect on her at all, she was simply there, her giant hand enfolding his, her stride encompassing two of his own, her voice deeper than those of the other mothers and less animated.

  He was about nine when he began to notice the differences, and to see that they mattered – that there was something about his mother that other people didn’t like, or that they found unsettling. The school gate exchanges were rare. Other mothers stood in twos and threes while their children ran around, confident in their sameness, their ordinariness. He stood by his mother, his hand trapped in her meaty fist, caught inside the force field of her bigness, her oddness, her not-the-sameness. Sometimes he could hear her breathing, far above – dragon breathing, heavy and deep, he could actually picture fire inside her, red hot coals shimmering. He became self-conscious, possessed by a gnarly mixture of protectiveness and resentment. If other people would only cross the space, be more friendly, then perhaps she would be less strange. And if she, his mother, could try a bit harder to be like them, they would find it easier to do that.

  Around the time he moved on to Collerton College everything took a turn for the worse. The breathing, the staring, the unreachable moods. And the attacks – not him, though she could land a heavy smack from time to time. No, it was his father she attacked. After one particularly bad evening of glaring silences he went up to bed and lay there, listening to his father’s voice, at first wheedling, then staccato as his temper rose, and then an explosion of movement, things crashing to the ground and hitting the walls, his father swearing violently, yelping and snarling like a dog.

  After a minute or two Nick got out of bed and went to the top of the stairs. There were no voices now, just a kind of muted turbulence punctuated by grunts and gasps and the crunch of breakages underfoot. His father appeared in the hallway, stooped over like a hunchback, one hand against the wall, his face d
ripping, he was spitting and gagging. Nick stepped back just as his mother appeared, walking quite normally. When she flew at his father it was like a snake striking, almost too quick for the eye to take in, her clawed hands coming down on his head and driving him to the ground.

  Nick let out a scream of terror, which made his mother look up and that was just long enough for his father to stumble out of the front door and slam it shut behind him. The air as well as the door seemed to shiver in the wake of that slam. Nick’s mother stared up at him as if she didn’t know who, or what, she was looking at. He would have liked to escape, but if he went back into his room and into his bed, how would he know that she wasn’t coming slowly up the stairs after him? At least here on the landing he wasn’t completely trapped; he had room for manoeuvre. The strip of carpet under his feet was greasy and cold. Still staring, his mother moved to the foot of the stairs, one hand on the banister, and now he could hear her breathing – long, deliberate breaths as though each one required an effort of concentration. The moment seemed to stretch and hold them like a web, or a bad spell, which he both wanted and feared to break.

  ‘Mum …?’

  His tiny scrape of a voice, and the word itself, were like a bad joke. However weird his mother had been, he had never before been scared of her. Embarrassed, yes, and even a little ashamed of her giant strangeness, but never, as now, terrified. He felt his smallness, and also a brittle hollowness that contained only fear, roiling inside him. All the energy that had got him out of bed, the energy that had made him scream, was gone. If she chose to come up the stairs and spring on him he would be able to do nothing.

  Still there was only the slow, deliberate hiss of her breathing.

  ‘Mum – are you all right?’

  Something happened then. He wasn’t quite sure what, but somewhere behind her face, deep inside her head, something shifted. At that moment he was too far away, too young and far too frightened to identify the change, but later he came to recognize that it was the pupils of her eyes dilating – coming back from the pinpricks which gave her eyes that blank, whitened look, and seeing her surroundings, and him, once more.

  Now the breathing got quieter, her shoulders softened, her hand slipped off the banister and brushed absent-mindedly at the front of her skirt. Her head moved from side to side as if she were wondering where she was. Though Nick was still trembling, some deep instinct told him that the best thing to do was to go down there, do something, anything, to make things seem normal, to keep his mother in the here and now. Slowly and carefully he went down the stairs, feeling her eyes on him. At the bottom he didn’t pause but stepped round her and went through to the kitchen, picking his way between the breakages, and righting a couple of fallen chairs. There was a broom in the corner behind the Hoover (neither of which got much use) and he swept the shards of china and glass into a pile by the wall. A full jar of jam had crashed off the shelf, a glutinous red cowpat studded with glass, but he didn’t know where to begin with that and left it where it was: at least the jam was holding the sharp pieces in one place. He propped the broom in front of the sweepings and got a couple of smeary glasses off the shelf. He poured some orange squash into each of them before filling them from the tap and carrying them back to where she was still standing in the hall, and held one out.

  ‘There you are, Mum.’

  She stared down at the glass while he held his breath. Then she took it from him and clasped it between both her hands. The hands had his father’s blood on them, little parallel streaks like marks left by a paint brush, where she had torn at his hair.

  ‘Night night,’ he said. She didn’t reply, but she did raise her glass to her lips and he heard her take a massive gulp, then more and more, chugging it down as he went back up the stairs.

  As he crossed the landing he heard her say in her deep voice but very quietly: ‘Thank you, Nicky.’

  Back in bed he cried, stuffing a fistful of rolled sheet into his mouth which made him gag but stifled the worst of the sobs. For some reason he believed she wouldn’t come up, or not straight away, and he was right. After a short while he heard her moving about down there … shuffle, clump, clump … what was she doing? He tensed as the steps came back into the hall, but the next thing he heard was the sound of the television, the bleepy music that heralded the nine o’clock news. Ordinary, everyday sounds that millions and millions of people, some better, some (though it was hard to imagine) worse, were also hearing.

  He thought he wouldn’t sleep – that he might never sleep again – but he did. What woke him was the sound of the front door. His father? Surely not his father? But it was, because then there were voices; his mother’s low and deep, intermittent, his father’s higher and harsher, whiney. The pitch of the exchange was just below the point where he could make out what was being said, but that was a good sign. Then one of them, he wasn’t sure which, began to cry.

  Not many weeks after that Nick’s mother went into hospital.

  ‘They’ve taken her in,’ was how his father put it when he got back from school. ‘Best place for her.’

  He didn’t need to ask why she’d gone, but his father was going to tell him anyway. ‘She went mad again. Berserk – you saw what it’s like. Only this time I saw it coming.’

  ‘What did she do?’

  ‘She went for me – you saw. That’s what she does. She’s not a well woman. Here …’ His father held out an arm, flapping his fingers in invitation, he was in a strikingly good mood. ‘Poor old Nick, eh, not something you want going on at home. Don’t worry, son, your mother’s in good hands.’

  Nick pretended not to notice the invitation but his father flung an arm across his shoulders anyway and subjected to him to a cringingly awkward sideways squeeze.

  From then on, that was how it went – periods of relative normality ranging from a few months to a year, building to the inevitable crises, which were followed by hospital treatment. When she first came back from hospital his mother would be docile and sedated, and supplied with many boxes of pills. To begin with Billy would administer these, but would always reach a point where he was bored, or over-confident and became lax, leaving Nick to take over as best he could. His mother would start to feel better in herself – whatever horrors drove and plagued her receded, and she too got blasé. So after the deep peace of the hospital, and the subsequent honeymoon period, the whole cycle would begin again. Home became a dark secret, and a no-go area for everyone but the three of them.

  That was why Billy had suggested Nick leave the College and get a job, and why Nick had agreed, just like that. The school with its drip-drip of notes, and enquiries, and options and invitations, got on Billy’s nerves. He had enough to deal with without fending off the whingeing bloody teachers. He wanted things cut and dried, with Nick bringing in some money. He knew his son was considered bright, and was therefore rather surprised by how readily he’d agreed.

  ‘You sure, son?’

  ‘I’m sick of school.’

  ‘All right then! They’re hiring at Dawson’s – you could drop in and ask.’

  Nick didn’t say he’d already had a word at the shop. ‘OK,’ he said, ‘I’ll do that.’

  ‘Better tell them at school.’

  ‘Sure,’ he said. ‘Shouldn’t be a problem. What can they do anyway?’

  And that’s what had led to today, with him standing uneasily by the window while his mother ate her slice of toast in that deliberate, chomping way she had, and his father – well, his father out there somewhere, likely to come back god-knows-when, ready to start all over again.

  He couldn’t have eaten the other slice of toast, it would have choked him. Instead he put it down next to her and turned on the television. It was a children’s programme with clean-cut presenters and a dog: her eyes locked on to it and stayed there. She was calm, content, back down from wherever she’d been.

  He left her sitting there, mesmerized, watching them make a pirate ship out of a plastic bottle and some lolly stic
ks, and went out of the front door.

  It had been surprisingly easy at Dawson’s. Old Dawson needed someone and didn’t ask questions except the obvious ones about hours and reliability, and whether he was prepared to do more or less anything to begin with. Nick could tell he liked him, liked his look and his way of speaking, and was perhaps pleasantly surprised by both after talking to Billy. He offered Nick a trial, beginning the following Monday, pay forty quid a month in arrears. A fortune!

  He didn’t quite know what he was going to do with himself over the next couple of days and the weekend. His father didn’t reappear until Saturday morning and in the interim everything was quiet. His mother didn’t sleep much, but she did that thing of going through the motions of domesticity – carrying things from room to room, heating things up on the stove, wiping a duster back and forth on the windows.

  He was always relieved when, against all expectation, Billy returned, but this time he could scarcely believe it. Whatever his father’s failings, he was the one who suffered directly and who, as far as Nick could tell, never retaliated. Admittedly he was smaller and lighter than his wife, but he was agile. He never even tried to defend himself. Nick was driven to the conclusion that whatever names he called her, however foul his language and humiliating his treatment at her hands, his father loved his wife – or had loved her once – and kept a memory of happier times that was just strong enough to keep him coming back. Billy was weak, but he wasn’t wicked. And that was just as well, because the thought of ever being left alone and in charge was one that was quite terrifying to Nick.

  That late summer and autumn of 1969, though he didn’t know it, they were all – Nick, his parents, Mrs Mayfield – entering one of those dreamlike golden periods that seem to exist in parenthesis to the general flow of life, and which in retrospect is only the precursor to a defining crisis. But at the time it seemed like very heaven.