Grave Misgivings

by Caroline Wood

  There was a constant murky darkness downstairs; the whole house was dark, but it was worse in that hallway. Even when it was bright and sunny outside, the hall was dark enough to need a light on. A small glass lampshade hung from the high ceiling, but the weak glow it gave didn’t do much to dissolve the shadows. I didn’t mind though. As soon as I stepped into that dim, pungent hallway, I felt comforted and safe. It was such an ordinary, neglected space, and belonged to no-one, yet I associated it with rescue from my real life. It was the place where I shed the burden of my unwanted existence as Colin’s wife and home-maker, and became instead a single young girl, arriving home to her own little room.

  I never thought of Colin while I was at the bed-sit. I was really good at disconnecting from reality. I took my rings off and left them on the table by the door. For one night a week I wasn’t married, Colin didn’t exist and there was no neat, modern council flat, waiting for my return, where I’d have to carry on with my performance as the happy young wife. There were no new sheets, no freshly painted magnolia walls. No new fridge humming in the stark, tidy kitchen. Or shabby but solid settee, donated by his parents when they bought their posh three piece suite. And there was no double bed, its acres of cold space demanding to be filled. None of the trappings of domestic life existed and I felt free. I felt just like I had back at the children’s home. Except this was better – this was having a space of my own, something I’d never had when I was there. None of us did.

  It wasn’t that there was anything wrong with Colin. He was nice enough; a run-of-the-mill sort of man. He didn’t beat me up or anything like that, and he was a good worker; earned the money and all that. It was just that I hadn’t meant to end up married to him. It had just sort of happened – we’d drifted into it I suppose. Well, not so much drifted as avalanched. We had been going out in a half-hearted way for about ten months. I wasn’t over the moon about him but he was reliable and he bought me loads of presents. So we just carried on.

  Then I got pregnant. They went mad at the home. It was the big thing we’d always been warned and lectured about. Well, all the girls had. I was coming up to leaving age anyway, so they said I’d have to go, get married, behave in a respectable way. Only I wasn’t actually pregnant. It was all a false alarm. But I was too old to stay by then – it was time for me to go and live in the big wide world. There were big rows before I left, about how I’d let the staff down and what a bad example I’d been for the younger girls. I got clever and said that in case they hadn’t noticed I wasn’t actually in the family way. But you can’t go back after that, can you? Even if you only think you’re pregnant, you can’t pretend you weren’t having sex once it turns out you’re not. I was scared about leaving but I wasn’t going to let anyone see that. I didn’t know anything about how to live in the outside world apart from what I’d seen on the telly.

  Colin was the only person I knew from outside the home. He’d been one of the gardeners in the grounds. Then he got a job in the big park but we kept going out, twice a week. So I married him. We had this quick little wedding at a register office and that was that. There were new clothes, a small bouquet that his auntie made, and a hired car. But no cake. I’d hoped for one of those three-tiered ones, a little archway on the top, with a bride and groom standing under it, all romantic and make-believe. I like a bit of make-believe, except when it comes to actually being the bride and groom. We did have confetti though. His close family came to watch us say our lines in the mid-morning ceremony. And that was that. After the big day, we settled into the same sort of routine that his parents had. We didn’t know how else to do it. I didn’t really know how to do it at all and just copied what I thought was the proper way to live – the way I’d always envied while I was growing up in the home. We ate bland, badly cooked meals and watched the telly. I did the housework and he read the papers. It was like when you’re a child, playing at being a grown-up. Only no-one came and took the dressing-up box away so we had to keep on with the game. Colin seemed happy with it. He never said he wasn’t, anyway.

  I went out with other men. I don’t think he saw other women though. I didn’t want sex or anything serious. I just wanted to have some fun. I’d meet blokes from work, or at the occasional party we were invited to by the neighbours. I loved the feeling of danger when I was making arrangements to see them; knowing that Colin was at the other end of the room, talking about allotments. I’d only see a bloke once and that would be the end of it. There’d be an evening in a pub, sitting and talking, flirting like a teenager off the telly; feeling that I’d got away from my real life. I never let myself think about Colin. I’d tell him I was out with mates and then put him out of my head. He belonged to a different part of my life; a different part of me. Once, a man took me to the zoo and we had a lovely day just wandering round – talking, laughing, being silly, and looking at the animals. Another time I went to the pictures with a boy two years younger than me. I was trying to steal some of his youth and naivety. It didn’t work though, and he only bored me in a different way to Colin. I was too old to go out with lads any more – to wander round in the evenings or hang about outside fish and chip shops, but I was too young to be queuing up in the supermarket with furniture polish and meals for my husband.

  That’s why I started going to the bed-sit. It freed me from the stage production of my life. It let me be invisible, just like everyone else who lived there. We were all locked away in our little rooms, private, hidden and quiet, while the real world passed us by on the outside of that huge, sad old house. All I knew about any of them was what I invented, based on the sounds I heard coming from their rooms or listening as they crept to the toilet or bathroom. Not that many of them used the bathroom on a Friday night. It was only once that I went to have my bath and found the door locked. I called out an apology but there was no reply. No light showed under the door and I couldn’t hear water running but I knew there was someone in there. You can tell when someone is listening back while you listen to them. You can almost see them standing on the other side of the door, keeping still and quiet, trying to work out if you’re still there while you do exactly the same thing. In the end I moved away really slowly and carefully. I wasn’t so worried about whoever it was in the bathroom but I didn’t want to get caught by one of the others going to the loo, a toilet-roll under their arm. All I’d heard was the echoing sounds of water dripping and plopping into the bath, so I knew it was full.

  What I didn’t know, not until halfway through the following week, that the water had been red. A young woman had been in there, stone cold and dead for two days before the landlord found her. I read it in the local paper. It didn’t give many details about her. Only her name and age and where she’d been found. It wasn’t on the front page or anything – there was just this little column at the side of a page. They usually put more in after they’ve done an inquest and everything. I thought she’d be the one that used to cry, but it wasn’t her – I heard her sobbing away just the same as always. I worked out which room she must have lived in, that woman who slit her wrists on my bath night, but I’d never seen her or known anything about her so I couldn’t miss her.

  The house felt exactly the same after her suicide. It had been her letting the cat live in her room. There was a letter from the landlord saying he’d found a box and blanket in her wardrobe, the cat curled up asleep. He said we mustn’t encourage the cat indoors any more; he’d had to hire a professional steam cleaner for the wardrobe. If this happened again, he said, he’d have no choice other than to pass on the expense. I thought that was a bit rich – he never spent any money on the place, everything was old and threadbare. He ended the letter by reminding everyone of the rules about pets. He didn’t mention the dead woman in the bath at all.

  Every time I arrived on a Friday evening after that, there was this small black cat sitting on the doorstep. It would stand up as soon as it saw me and rub circles round and round my ankles while I was getting my key out. I had to be really quick g
etting in the door because it would try to dart inside. I felt sorry for the poor thing – it couldn’t understand why it wasn’t allowed to come in any more. I imagined it all tucked up in a box in that woman’s wardrobe and felt sad that it couldn’t get back to the place it knew as home. I wondered if the wardrobe had been damp and smelt of cat’s pee like the hall – perhaps all her clothes had been impregnated with the smell of cat. I thought about taking it back to the flat and giving it a proper home with me and Colin, but I didn’t even see it as a proper home myself so it didn’t seem fair. I decided to let it go and find another life of its own. Cats are good at adapting.

  It wasn’t long before there was a new person in the empty room. I never saw them, never even knew if it was a man or a woman. I tried to listen at the door a few times but couldn’t hear anything. All I knew was that they were a bit slow to pick up on the way things worked in the house. I found a pack of two toilet rolls they’d left in the loo and a bottle of shampoo in the bathroom – it was one of those economy sized ones and lasted for months. It didn’t smell all that nice but it foamed up a lot and covered the water with bubbles, which stopped me thinking about the dead woman while I was having a soak. I think it was only me and the new person who used the bath after that woman had killed herself. The new person probably didn’t know, and I didn’t think about it; I just shut it out.

  Sometimes though, it used to come back to me about that Friday I’d stood listening, the other side of the bathroom door. I still think she was listening as well, but I’ll never know, of course. Sometimes, you just know things without knowing how – instinct, I suppose. I know she was still alive – I sensed her there. She wasn’t already dead, under her red water, her eyes staring at the stains on the ceiling. And she wasn’t in the middle of doing it – sitting there, listening for me to go away, with a razor blade ready to slice through her wrist. I think she did that afterwards. And it’s not like I could have saved her or anything – I didn’t know she was going to end her life. I was just a bit put out that I couldn’t get in the bathroom. And I’m sure she was listening to me, her ear pressed against the door, waiting for me to creep away. But anyway, I try not to dwell on it too much. I’ve always been good at disconnecting from things.

  They tell me not to do it now. Tell me it’s not helping, and that I have to face things so I can get on with my life. They’re wrong of course. I know it helps me more than anything else – anything they could do, that’s for sure. What they don’t understand is that I am good at adapting, always have been. I needed to be with all the different staff that came and went in the home, all the different ways of doing things, all the changes when some of the kids got adopted or fostered, and the even worse ones when they got brought back again. That was when you’d have to get used to kids being difficult – kids that had been okay before would come back and cause trouble. Smash windows; beat you up even though they’d been your friend before; steal your things, piss on your bed, that sort of thing. And they’d hurt themselves as well – bang their head against the wall until it was bruised and swollen, or put their hand through a window, just like that. One boy stood in the grounds all morning with no clothes on – the staff trying to coax him to put down the kitchen knife he was waving about and come back indoors. He did in the end, but not before he ran the blade from one side of his neck to the other. He was all right – the scar hardly showed and we all used to joke that his head would fall off if he went out when it was windy. You had to be quick to adapt with things changing all the time. You never knew what was coming, how long anything would last.

  I’ve been here nearly three years now. I’ve got all my little bits and pieces round me – they let you do that; put your personality on the room. It’s not the same as when I had the bed-sit, but at least I can get away and be on my own. I can’t lock the door though. One thing that is similar is the toilets. No-one ever seems to go at the same time. I listen at my door, with it open just a crack, and wait until there’s no-one about before I make a quick dash. I think the others do it as well. You don’t have to take your own toilet roll here though – it’s locked into a metal container so no-one can pinch it.

  Colin doesn’t visit any more. I’m glad; it used to be awkward. We never knew what to say to each other. He got married again as soon as our divorce came through. I don’t know her name. I hope she’ll be better at it than I was. Colin is the sort of man that needs to be married; the sort of man that needs a routine. He needs a garden shed and his dinner on the table when he comes home from work – just like it is on the telly. His parents must have wondered how on earth he’d managed to get tangled up with me – all they wanted for him was the same life they had themselves. They could probably see that wasn’t going to happen with a wife like me, although they didn’t know how right they were. They didn’t know I lived one night a week in a bed-sit or that I’d lay soaking in a bath where a young woman had waited for her life to ebb away while she listened to the taps dripping. You couldn’t expect them to understand, could you? It’s not what happens in proper lives. Or on the telly. I don’t even understand it myself. But I don’t try either. I just shut it all out and adapt to whatever comes along.

  They make us have these meetings. We’re supposed to talk about how we are, what we’re feeling and if there are any problems between us. What happens instead is we go over the same old stuff about who does the washing-up, whose turn it is to set the tables and that sort of thing. No-one here talks about themselves. We don’t even look at each other. We’ve all got our own ways of getting by.

  They call this supported housing and it’s good because you don’t have to be part of the outside world, but no-one here wants the kind of support they’re trying to give us. They want to help us to integrate into the community, learn how to lead our own lives in the big wide world. But we can’t do that, that’s how come we ended up here, and why we don’t want to leave. All we want – well, all I want anyway, is to be left alone to live life the only way I can. I need my own little room to escape to, with my own things in it. Then I know it’s my proper home and I feel safe and settled. It’s my cups that make me feel like that. When I look at them on my shelf, I know I belong and that I’ve got the same ordinary things that other people have got. The only thing is, without a lock on the door, I can’t be sure someone won’t pinch them. So I take them with me. I take them when I go to breakfast, to medication time, dinner, the shower block – everywhere. I’ve saved up lots of newspaper from the day room – brought it back a sheet at a time, tucked up my jumper. Now I know which sheet goes with which cup and every time I go out of my room I pack them all up, put them carefully in my carrier bag, and take them with me. You’ve got to be ready for changes. Got to be able to adapt.

  * The Last Train Home *

  She couldn’t remember the last time she had been out this late at night. Whenever it was, she wouldn’t have been on her own. He would have been with her, snapping out his sharp commands. She let her thoughts wander as the train began its jerking, stilted movements out of the station. Perhaps it had been that New Year’s Eve party, many years ago now? He hadn’t wanted to go, she remembered that, but had felt obliged because it was a company do. And she’d had to go with him, of course; be the voiceless, smiling wife in that stiff, second-hand gown she’d hated. Had to listen to his sour complaints on the journey there, and watch him transform in the presence of his bosses. If that had been the time, she had paid the usual price for his efforts at charm in front of other people. A late journey home, both of them tired and irritable, filled with bitter accusations about how she had let him down, had not looked as good as the other wives, hadn’t made the right impression. Then there had been three days of his frightening, gloom-laden silence for her and the boys. Happy New Year indeed.

  She settled back in her seat, could feel the rough, slightly prickly fabric digging in behind her knees and at the back of her head. They don’t make these very comfortable, do they? she thought. Still, never mind. She
looked along the rows of seats, still amazed at how many people were out and about at this time of night. When her middle son had suggested she catch the last train, she had worried about being alone for the long journey home. She imagined just a couple of other passengers; men most likely, and probably drunk. Her son – Joseph – had laughed and told her not to worry. He’d been right. This carriage was almost full and you would never think it was just after midnight; people were talking, laughing, even eating. And a man had already announced that the buffet car was open. For her, it was another world.

  She had felt so proud, waiting at the station with her tall, handsome son. Joseph had carried her bag and she’d held onto his arm; contact that she was not permitted with his father. And when they’d sat drinking coffee at that little station café – such an unfamiliar thing to do; almost glamorous! – she had watched his smiling face and his gentle manner. She could have cried then, as she nearly did every time she saw him, with relief and gratitude that he had survived the years of bullying and taunting by his father.