by Alison Moore
‘. . . pioneering a social change . . . ’ says John.
‘A good man.’
‘. . . that will transform the landscape . . . ’
‘But he needs his Saturdays out.’
‘Well,’ I say, ‘he’s always gone to the club.’
My mother sips at her tea.
‘Coming up next . . . ’ says John.
I am in town on market day, squinting through the autumn sun as I browse, rubbing fabrics between my fingers, picking up cheap paperbacks, the end-of-day shouts repeating like poetry in my ears:
Five pound bag for a pound bananas
Two pound a pound on your seedless grapes
Four cauliflower for a pound now ladies
Two pound o’ mushroom for a quid.
I am eye to dead eye with a rabbit strung up on the butcher’s stall when I catch sight of my father. I make my way through the market crowd, my father dipping in and out of view until he is close enough to hear me say, ‘Hi Dad.’ Panic flits across his face.
He says, ‘Cathy!’ as if he has not seen me in years. He is with another man but does not introduce me.
‘I thought you were going to the club.’
‘I’m just on my way there now,’ he says, like a boy found dawdling to school.
‘I’ll see you later then.’ I head home and my father goes in the other direction, taking a long way round to the club.
My mother is lying on the sofa. The television is on but she is asleep. Half a cup of tea is on the table in front of her and the bottle of gin is empty. I switch the television off and my mother wakes up with a start.
‘John?’ she says.
‘It’s me, Mum,’ I say.
‘Oh, hello, love. I was just having a little lie down. What time is it?’
‘It’s about six. I’ve just got back from town. I saw Dad.’
‘Did you? Who was he with?’
‘No one I know. A man with a ginger beard.’
My mother nods.
‘He said he was just off to the club.’
‘It’s not there any more, you know,’ she says as I sit down next to her. ‘The club’s gone. They knocked it down. It’s a car park now. He still goes,’ she adds, and starts to laugh and laughs until she says, ‘Oh dear.’ I notice then that the sofa cushions are warm and wet beneath us, and there is a weak smell of urine in the air. ‘Don’t tell your father,’ she says, looking at me and slowly closing and opening one eye, red-rimmed from the gin-soaked nap and maybe crying.
Wink wink.
If There’s Anything Left
A queue has formed on the narrow staircase, a build-up of other hotel guests trying to get down to the breakfast room. James, waiting at the bottom, observing Kath’s steady progress, is reminded of a tractor or a learner driver tailed by an impatient push of rush-hour traffic.
Someone says to someone else, ‘There’ll be nothing left by the time we get there.’ They do not say this quietly.
Kath used to be so thin, too thin, James thought. He joked about losing her in the bed. His friends called her a catch and his father called her a keeper but even after they were married James often felt as if he were still trying to catch her. She was always so busy, forever dashing off somewhere or going on ahead.
Since the accident, though, she has slowed right down and she has put on weight. Now she always seems to be eating and her clothes are a size larger than his mother’s. James knows that even as they make their way down to breakfast, she will have in her jacket pocket an emergency bag of sweets to suck on.
When Kath finally reaches the bottom of the stairs, people overtake her on both sides like a school of fish parting around an obstacle or a potential predator, before coming together again. Kath stops and waits until they have all gone, and then she moves forward towards the dining room.
It is not an expensive hotel – it is small, smaller than he remembers, and a bit run-down – but it is right on the seafront. They came here last summer. It seems longer ago. After breakfast, they might sit outside on the bench, an uncomfortable ironwork two-seater. Kath wants to walk along the beach to the pier, from the end of which they watched last summer’s sunsets. She wants to take Zac there.
Yesterday, they had their lunchtime fish and chips on the bench, watching the seagulls going after the scraps. Afterwards, on the beach, Kath stripped off to her modest underwear, having come to the seaside without a bikini, and James turned away from her empty breasts. He supposes that the scar from her Caesarean is almost invisible now. Her other scars have healed well.
Kath wandered down to the edge of the sea, putting her feet in the water, while James sat on his towel fully clothed. Before he lay back, he saw her reach around and unhook her bra, slipping it off her shoulders and dropping it onto the stones behind her. He saw her removing her knickers and throwing them down too. He watched her walking out. When she was up to her waist – and still going deeper, even though, he thought, it had to be cold – he lay down and closed his eyes.
When he woke up, he had no idea how much time had passed. He felt as if he had been asleep for ages, but the sun was still high in the cloud-covered sky – he could see the blurry brightness of it trying to burn through. It had been a cool week. He wanted a heatwave, that melting feeling.
He sat up. He could see a distant figure in the sea. It was probably Kath. He could not tell whether she was still swimming out or heading in. He stood up and got back onto the prom, leaving his beach towel behind. He had not weighted it in any way. It occurred to him that he would have liked to look back and see it blowing away down the beach. He did not turn around.
He went back to the hotel room and then to the pub. This morning, he remembered standing at the bar with some man who said to him, ‘What’s in the bag?’
In the dining room, Kath goes straight to the hot buffet while James sees what fruit juice is left. Each morning, the proprietor puts out jugs filled to the brim, but he does not replenish them. When it is gone it is gone. The orange juice always goes first. James takes the last of the grapefruit juice to their table. Kath, sitting down with a full English breakfast, says to him, ‘Are you going to eat?’ James looks at the food on her plate but it turns his stomach; there is nothing there that he could face.
Kath never used to be very interested in food, or didn’t have time for it. These days she bakes; she makes big meals and James has to tell her that he is not hungry. He goes off to work without any breakfast and does not come home from the pub in time for dinner. She asks him what he has eaten and sometimes he makes something up, something nourishing and warming, because it’s what she wants to hear. He doesn’t always do this though; he doesn’t always tell her what she wants to hear.
It was Kath’s idea to come here. ‘Getting away’ she called it, but that depends on what you’re trying to get away from. What he wants is to be back at work. Kath is keen for him to look for a new job, something which would not entail such increasingly long hours, such a tiring drive. Then, she says, he wouldn’t have to leave the house almost as soon as they get up. ‘We’d have more time together in the mornings,’ she tells him. ‘We could meet up for lunch.’
James, though, does not want something closer to home. He does not want a job which starts later and finishes earlier and enables him to see Kath at lunchtime. He likes his job, he says.
They chose their house because of its convenience for Kath’s work. He remembers her telling people that all she had to do was zip down the A road, that she could be at work in ten minutes flat.
‘There’s a thirty zone in the middle, though,’ said James, ‘which slows you down.’
Someone said, ‘It won’t slow Kath down,’ and people laughed.
He remembers going to view their house when the estate was being built, when Kath was newly pregnant and waking up in the mornings feeling nauseous, with an ache
in her breasts. The house was empty, all bare boards and bare walls and echo and the garden was a long stretch of bare, frozen mud. There was a show house which they went to see, so that they could imagine how theirs might look, with a dining table set for a family meal, and bunk beds in the second bedroom.
Even the baby didn’t slow her down. Soon bored of being at home, Kath got back to work as quickly as she could, whizzing first to the nursery with Zac and dropping him off before dashing to work, desperate for office life.
James wonders whether the barrier has been repaired yet. These things can take a long time. Kath told him that someone had left a bouquet of flowers next to the damaged post. ‘They still had the cellophane on,’ she said. ‘I think they’d look nicer without the cellophane, don’t you? When the flowers die it will just be litter.’
Kath clears her plate and struggles to her feet, going back to the buffet for more. The hot breakfast dishes are almost empty. She scrapes what she can from them. James looks over at the fruit juice table but there is only one jug left and it contains what looks like tomato juice, which he does not want; it would not be quenching.
When Kath is sitting down again, James says to her, ‘I walked along the beach last night.’ She picks up her cutlery. He says, ‘I went to the pier.’
From the look on her face, he knows she has realised what he is telling her, that it is sinking in. She is getting to her feet again. She is going to go all the way up those stairs to their bedroom to look on the dressing table, to see what is or isn’t there.
‘The urn’s empty,’ he says, but she is going anyway. She has to see for herself.
He remembers the man in the pub saying, ‘Most of the body becomes gas. It just goes. You don’t bring it home with you.’
James leaves the dining room too, but he turns away from the stairs and heads outside, his eyes watering as he emerges from the relative dinge into weak sunlight. Sitting down on the filigree loveseat, he puts his hand to his breast pocket, wanting his sunglasses, but they’re not there.
Static
Wilfred takes the dirty teacup from the bedside table. Dorothy’s eyes are closed, but she is still awake, just resting. The gilt-edged, rose-print Duchess has seen better days. The inside is stained with tannin and the gilding is worn.
‘I’ll be back with a fresh one,’ he says. He closes the bedroom door behind him and climbs slowly down the stairs, the bone china cup trembling on its saucer.
In the kitchen, he puts the used teacup in the empty stainless steel sink and stands for a few minutes looking out of the window into the back garden. They have lived in this house their whole married life. From time to time, Dorothy has suggested moving – sometimes to another town or to the countryside, sometimes to the sea or even abroad. They could even travel, she said, now that their children were grown up and no longer at home. But he would rather stay where they are. He grew up in this town; he has never lived anywhere else in his life.
The things on the windowsill are Dorothy’s. There is a small frame containing an old photograph of a woman. She is so familiar. She has been on the kitchen windowsill for forty years and he has no doubt looked at her every day, and yet he has no idea, he thinks now, who she is. She looks a lot like his Dorothy – perhaps he knew once that it was a favourite aunt or a grandmother, but if he ever knew he doesn’t know now.
Next to the photograph is an empty vase, and a stone the size of his fist. He picks it up, weighs it on his palm. It has a hole worn through the middle; it is like a cored apple. He wonders how it got there, the hole. Through it he can see his own hand, the naked pinkness, his life line and his love line.
Dorothy listens to a programme called Love Line on a local radio station. Listeners call in with their own stories about how they met someone or lost someone, with proposals and confessions, and then they request a dedication, a love song. Sentimental popcorn, says Wilfred. He is not one of the world’s great romantics, says Dorothy. She used to tease him about calling in with a request for her, but she hasn’t mentioned it in a while.
The radio isn’t working properly. When he turns it on there is interference, white noise. He picks it up, takes it over to the table and sits down. For a minute, he just holds it, this beautiful, broken old thing, and then he takes a coin out of his pocket, fits it in the slot on top of the plastic case, and twists. The case pops apart.
It is a lovely little transistor radio, a Constant, turquoise and gold. It is the radio Dorothy brought into the antiques shop where he used to work, asking if they did repairs. He wasn’t supposed to, said Wilfred, not unless she was selling. He looked at the Vulcan 6T-200 she was holding, her slender thumb with its polished nail toying with the dial. It was foreign; he hadn’t seen one before. He didn’t know how it worked, what he would find if he prised open the case. But yes, said Wilfred, he could do it.
After they were married, it drove Dorothy mad to find their things in bits all the time – the component parts of the record player all over the carpet, her music box disassembled on the sofa, the mess of stuff all over the kitchen table. She worried about small, crucial pieces getting lost – slipping down behind the sofa cushions, rolling under the fridge, dropping between the floorboards. She told him off for tinkering with things that weren’t broken, things that weren’t his, for having such busy little fingers.
Dorothy, confined to bed now by her illness, frets about the downstairs rooms she can’t see. She imagines Wilfred pottering about dismantling their things; she imagines the dishes and the washing and the dirt piling up. She has to rely on him to keep it all in good order. She says to him, ‘All as it should be?’
‘All as it should be,’ he says, holding out his dishpan hands as proof.
To look at her, he thinks, you wouldn’t suspect a thing. You wouldn’t know that beneath her clear skin a tumour is eating her alive; you wouldn’t know that her calm, grey eyes are going blind. She is losing her memory; she has lost the feeling in her toes. ‘When I’m better,’ she said, ‘we’ll go walking again, and I need new walking boots.’
‘Yes, love,’ he said, taking her dirty cup from the bedside table.
Wilfred sits quietly gutting the radio on the kitchen table, on the plastic tablecloth. The tablecloth depicts the changing seasons. Tiny screws lie at the base of the autumn tree like strange windfall. His right arm rests on winter, the thinning elbow of his cardigan pressing against the bare tree, against the snow, against the cold plastic.
When Dorothy got ill, he didn’t change the channel; he listened to her programme while he washed up, and caught himself singing ‘Just One Smile’ while he dried the dishes. But mostly he moves about in silence, in socks on the carpet, while Dorothy sleeps upstairs. He feels like a stealthy burglar, quietly rooting through drawers, looking for everyday things which Dorothy has always been in charge of, looking for paper on which to write a letter to his brother-in-law, looking for her recipes so that he can make Dorothy her favourite dessert. He has never written to his brother-in-law or made a dessert in his life; these things are in Dorothy’s domain. He feels like a trespasser in Dorothy’s house, going through a stranger’s things.
He found her scrapbook of favourite recipes in the big bottom drawer in the kitchen, with annotations in pencil – nice cold the next day, tinned is fine, good with almonds. Her favourite dessert is tiramisu; it is the first thing she ever made for him. The pencilled note says, Wilfred didn’t like it.
She is very tidy, Dorothy, but she is a hoarder. In the same drawer, he found a serviette from a café, a handful of seashells, old theatre and concert programmes, a small fluffy toy he once won at a fairground – a cheap thing which she has kept all this time. He found birthday cards – To Dorothy, they said each year, with love from Wilfred – and the cursory postcards he sent her when he was away from the family on business trips, and half a dozen letters, aged and faded, the postmarks almost as old as their youngest daughter. He to
ok them out and read them and it was like falling through a hole. My darling, they said to Dorothy, who was still so young. He leaned his weight on the kitchen counter, the pages quivering from the slight tremble in his fingers. I love you, they said, and Yours always. He is not, Dorothy has said, an emotional man, but, reading these old letters he found that his cheeks had become wet. He dried them on his shirt sleeve and then pulled the arm of his cardigan down over the damp cuff. He put the letters back in their envelopes and returned them to the drawer. He put everything back the way it had been, keeping it all in good order.
He bends over the radio’s innards like a surgeon exploring a patient on the operating table, searching for the fault – looking for something loose, looking for degradation – wanting to fix it; trying, with his set of tiny screwdrivers and his Brasso, to turn back time, to make this old thing like new, as it used to be, as it is supposed to be.
There has never been another woman in his life. He has never wanted anyone but Dorothy.
They honeymooned in Morecambe. They walked on the beach, Dorothy pausing every few steps to pick up some pretty thing which caught her eye, filling her pockets with empty shells. Wilfred, dawdling beside her, wanted nothing more, wanted nothing to change.
They spent their summer holidays in Morecambe too – every year except one, when Dorothy suggested trying somewhere new. They tried Scarborough, but Wilfred didn’t enjoy it. ‘It’s not Morecambe,’ he said.
The last of the winter light dribbles in through the two small kitchen windows. The outside world, with all its people, all its noise, all its growth and change, seems miles away. The world is these two windows, these two patches of blank, grey sky. It is not even four o’clock but it is getting dark. He switches on the too-bright striplight which Dorothy would be glad to see the back of, along with the rest of the tired old kitchen. Some of the cupboard doors are loose, and the big bottom drawer sticks, and the sink leaks, and the linoleum floor is worse for wear. ‘When I’m better,’ Dorothy said, ‘we should get a new kitchen – new units, and a sink with a mixer tap, and nice stone tiles on the floor.’ A stone floor would be cold in the winter, he said, and mixer taps were unhygienic. He liked it, he said, the way it was, but he would tighten the hinges on the cupboard doors and reseal the sink.