by Alison Moore
The dog is running into and out of the water and trotting along in the wet sand revealed by the falling tide. Valda thinks about the sand and salt which will cling to its nut-brown coat.
She hears the kettle reaching boiling point. It is hours since she woke up wanting that first cup of tea of the day, but every morning a certain number of chores must be done before she will allow herself to have it.
Taking the laundry basket into the kitchen, she loads the washing machine and sets it going. She watches it for a while, the soapy water rising up behind the glass door, her things sloshing and tumbling. Her family pack of detergent is almost empty. She had a freezer full of food, a cupboard full of provisions, but it is nearly all gone. There is only her and she is careful, but of course it goes in the end.
Lifting the still-steaming kettle, she pours hot water into her cup and fishes out the teabag. She doesn’t like it too strong. She adds some long-life milk and is just putting in her sweetener when the telephone rings. Going back out into the hallway, to the phone she keeps on a table in front of the little window, she lifts the receiver to her ear but there is no one there. It is one of those cold calls which leave you standing there saying, ‘Hello? Hello?’ with no reply.
That young boy is near the water now. He is wearing one of those short wetsuits. He must be cold, thinks Valda. It looks cold out there. But maybe it isn’t. She doesn’t know. She has not been outside recently. His wetsuit looks, she thinks, like something he has grown out of, like something for which his prepubescent limbs are now too long. She wonders whether it can really keep him warm in the cold water.
He stands at the edge of the sea, with his back to her. Valda looks along the beach, hoping to see someone who will notice the boy and tell him that he shouldn’t go out there. But apart from the boy and the dog, she can’t see a soul.
The boy begins his walk into the water, holding on to his board. He does not inch out like John used to do, and like she imagines she would except that she does not swim at all. He strides, appearing to have no fear of this grey sea, not to feel its chill. He lies tummy-down on his surfboard and paddles further out to where the sea looks especially rough. Uncertainly, he stands, and is immediately knocked off his board by a wave and Valda loses sight of him. Someone, she thinks, needs to warn him, to stand on the shore and shout, ‘You shouldn’t be out there!’ or, ‘It isn’t safe!’ or, ‘Come back!’
She sees him again, his head and shoulders out of the water. He climbs back onto his surfboard, and again he is instantly bowled over. The sea is rough today, full of big waves. She watches until she finds him again, scrambling onto his board. He is trying so hard but he can’t seem to stay on his feet.
She puts her hand on the doorknob and then takes it off again. He wouldn’t hear her anyway; she would be shouting into the wind. And besides, the door is locked and she can’t think where the key might be. She goes back into the kitchen and fetches her tea, carrying it towards the living room. But she diverts once again to the window, peering out. At first, she doesn’t see him, and then she does and he is so far out, and still there is no one to tell him that he shouldn’t be there. Even the dog is nowhere in sight.
She begins opening drawers: the ones in the telephone table, hunting through scraps of paper and pens; and the ones in which she keeps woolly hats and gloves, searching underneath them, finding pebbles and shells and, right there after all with these other bits and pieces, where it must have been all along, the key for the back door. There is a slight tremble in her hand as she puts the key in the lock and turns it. When she pulls at the door, it sticks and she remembers that the sea air does this to the wood. She has to put all her strength into it and is taken by surprise when the door suddenly opens.
She hurries out over the shingle, down to the shore where the waves crash down before sliding back out, dragging the smaller stones with them.
Taking no care to keep her slippers dry, she stands in the shallows and yells to the boy in the sea, ‘You shouldn’t be out there!’ She wades out with only her nightclothes to protect her from the cold. She can feel the current tugging at her bare legs. She is astonished by the power of the waves which topple her and return her to the beach, the sea spitting her out like unwanted gristle.
Someone says, ‘Are you all right?’
Valda looks up. The woman who waves is standing above her, the nut-brown dog beside her. Valda, on her knees now in the surf, in her sodden nightie, tries to tell the woman about the boy. ‘He’s too far out,’ she says.
‘He’s OK,’ says the woman. ‘Let me help you.’ She takes one of Valda’s hands and gets her onto her feet. ‘You’re freezing,’ she says.
Valda remembers the tea which she has not yet had. It is still on the sill beneath the small window and will need heating through. Or she might need to make a fresh pot for this woman who is probably going to come inside her house, who is walking beside her now, over the stones to her back door. The three of them – Valda and the woman and the dog – are going to walk the beach right into the house. There will be paw prints in the hallway. The house will smell of wet dog and the sea long after the woman and her dog have gone home. Valda will keep finding sand.
When they reach the back door, Valda, turning, sees the lifeguards arriving. She watches them carrying their red and yellow flags onto the beach, planting them in the pebbles, putting one on either side of the stretch of sea in which the boy is surfing, marking out a zone which they will patrol. She turns back to the house and opens the door and the dog goes in first.
The Smell of the Slaughterhouse
Rachel’s father opens the door and looks at her. Seeing her small suitcase, he says, ‘Is that it?’
‘I’ll go back for more,’ she says. She will go when Stan’s out. If she goes when he’s in, he will tell her that he loves her, and she doesn’t want to hear it. Or perhaps she won’t go back. She could leave it all behind and buy new clothes, new everything.
Stepping inside, she sees that she is treading something into the house. She leaves the offending shoe outside, puts the other one on the shoe rack and hangs up her coat. Her father, closing the door behind her, fetches paper towels and carpet freshener. Then he picks up her suitcase and she follows him through the floral mist to the stairs.
He carries her suitcase up to her room, puts it down on the bed and says, ‘I’ll leave you to it.’
She packed hastily but has remembered her make-up. She takes her cosmetics case into the bathroom, where she washes her hands and face with her father’s soap before reapplying her foundation, covering the bruising.
Back in her bedroom, she undresses, putting her clothes into the laundry basket and choosing something clean from her suitcase. She puts the rest of her things into the drawers and onto hangers. Her room has not changed at all. When she has finished unpacking and has put her empty suitcase under the bed, it is almost as if she has never been away.
She can hear the kettle boiling and crockery chinking in the kitchen.
Downstairs, she finds her father on his way into the dining room with a pot of tea, cups and a packet of lemon sponge fingers on a tray. Putting everything down on the table, he says, ‘Shall I be mother?’
Her mother always had a clean shirt waiting for Rachel’s father when he got in from work, ready for him to put on after his shower. He smelt heavily of his carbolic soap at teatime.
There was always a cloth on the dining table, and something home-baked. There might be some quiet jazz on the stereo. Her mother would pour the tea and ask about his day. He never really talked about it though. ‘Fine,’ he would say, or, ‘Busy.’
Her mother would say, ‘Good,’ or, ‘It’s better to be busy,’ and nothing much more would be said.
Rachel, sitting down now at the table and accepting sugar in her tea, remembers how she used to look at her father, at the well-washed hands in which he held his slice of cake and his t
eacup, and she would think to herself that no one would know he had just come from the abattoir.
Except that the smell of the carbolic soap with which he scrubbed himself daily, and whose reek is on her own skin now, has come to seem to her, over the years, like the smell of the slaughterhouse itself.
Helicopter Jean
‘Now then,’ says my father, pushing the nettles aside with the umbrella, ‘which way?’ We consider our choice of muddy paths. ‘I think we’ll try down there,’ he says, and we walk on, completely lost. ‘Did we come this way before?’ he asks. ‘Did we turn left or right here?’
‘I don’t know,’ I say. ‘Maybe left.’ I don’t recognise it at all. Left looks drier.
‘Left it is,’ he says.
He is wearing his windcheater, the same one he wore for Sunday walks when I was small. He is carrying my mother’s umbrella. It is pastel-coloured and patterned with tiny flowers and has a wrist loop which he has utilised.
He points the umbrella at a stream and says, ‘That shouldn’t be here, that should be way over there.’ He frowns down at the stream, annoyed. ‘All right,’ he says, ‘we’ll try this way,’ and we push on.
We came here often in my childhood. I should know it better than this. I recognise the smell of the bracken, and dung from the nearby farm. I remember the tall, thin trees with high, sparse branches, and the bluebells. I remember riding on my father’s shoulders with my head seven feet in the air, his hands around my ankles, my mother striding ahead singing hymns and ‘Leaving on a Jet Plane’. She was the only one with any sense of direction. She had an aerial view in her head and was our guide. She could stand in the middle of the woods and point north or north-north-east or to home. It is a skill I did not inherit.
‘This is right,’ he says, hopefully. We pass a horse chestnut tree and he stops and pokes at the lower branches with the umbrella. He says, ‘Do you remember being lost on Blankenberge beach?’
‘Yes,’ I say, ‘I do.’
I had stayed with my mother, sitting between two breakwaters, while my father went to the pier. I watched him walk away down the beach, becoming a tiny figure in the distance, and then decided I wanted to go too. Leaving my mother sunbathing, I followed him, or tried to. I lost him for a while and then spotted him on the pier. I shouted but he was too far away to hear me. I couldn’t see how to get up there. There must have been steps in the wall somewhere but I couldn’t for the life of me find them. So I walked back towards where I had left my mother but I couldn’t find her either. I had no landmarks other than the breakwaters and they all looked the same. I went to and fro, back to the pier which I could not reach and then back to the breakwaters, walking further and further up the beach until finally I saw her, sitting in the shade in her turquoise swimsuit, just her feet in the sun. But when I arrived, when she looked up, it was a stranger’s face which smiled at me.
In fact, my mother wasn’t there, where I was looking. She had packed up and gone to the pier. She was already up there, high above the beach. But I didn’t know this at the time. I felt very lost and wondered what would happen if I never found them again. In my head, I practised saying No to strange men.
‘When we realised you weren’t with either of us,’ says my father, ‘I left your mother on the pier and came to look for you. I could see you on the beach. You were a long way off, walking towards me. I stood and watched you. You looked very serious.’
Turning and walking back towards the pier, I was surprised to find just how far I had wandered, how far from the pier I was. And I was still looking for a distant figure, concentrating on the place where I had last seen my father. I didn’t see him standing right there on the promenade, watching me.
‘You would have been about eight,’ he says.
When I was about eight, my father used to sit at the kitchen table, topping and tailing the green beans he had grown in the garden. He worked very quietly and precisely, cutting neat diagonals until he had a bowl full of parallelograms which my mother boiled. He was cool with a kitchen knife. He could peel a cooking apple in one long curl of green skin, and I watched him with eyes which were his, only smaller.
I was about eight in the days of Beautiful Jean, ballroom dancing on a Monday night, my mother coming downstairs in a sexy, floaty dress like Angela Rippon on Morecambe and Wise, and my father standing at the foot of the stairs watching her, saying, ‘Beautiful Jean,’ as he held out his arm for her to take. Then one week he said instead, ‘Shall we give it a miss? I think we’re a bit past dancing, don’t you?’ She stood on the stairs and grew old then and there. Her waist expanded and her feet grew corns, and she turned and went back upstairs, her sequins catching the light before she disappeared.
I entered adolescence. My father, troubled by his overgrown daughter, by the sudden appearance of a young woman where his little girl had been, became the slowly turning pages of a newspaper and the opening and closing of the lounge door while I sat in front of the television watching Blake’s Seven, in which Surrey was an alien planet.
Meanwhile, my mother was cutting the beans herself, or bringing them to me and telling me not to fuss with them, just to cut them, they were just beans. She went walking on her own, wearing his windcheater.
One Saturday, somebody phoned and spoke to my father, who came upstairs to my bedroom, knocking on my closed door, to tell me that my mother had fallen and broken her ankle. After being found by another walker, she’d been helicoptered to the hospital. My father went to see her, leaving me at a neighbour’s house.
Mrs Abbott let me into her kitchen. It was a nice kitchen – spotless, not a thing out of place. There was a crystal bowl of pristine fruit on the side and the bin was in a cupboard. It looked like a show-home or studio-set version of our own. She sat me down at the kitchen table and then stood back and looked at me, as if she might decide I looked untidy there and put me somewhere else. She smiled pleasantly and said, ‘Your poor father. Your mother’s always had a streak in her, hasn’t she?’
I asked to use the loo. ‘I know where it is,’ I said, the house being exactly like ours.
Upstairs, all the doors were closed. I opened the door to my right and stood there, unsettled to find that this was not the bathroom. Where we had our bathroom, the Abbotts had their main bedroom, and lounging on the rumpled bed was Mr Abbott wearing nothing but his socks, smoking a cigarette. Wagging a hairy leg to and fro, he said, ‘Coming in?’ Then he laughed and shrugged and said, ‘Only joking. Toilet? Next one along.’
I closed the bedroom door.
In the Abbotts’ immaculate bathroom, I used the loo. While I sat there, I leafed through Mrs Abbott’s magazines. When I was finished, I looked for toilet paper but couldn’t see any, so I used the magazines, tearing pages from The Lady and Beautiful Home. Then I went back downstairs.
I visited Mum in hospital and one nurse said to another, ‘This is Jean’s daughter.’
‘Which Jean?’
‘Helicopter Jean.’
I loved Helicopter Jean. I pictured her flying high above the treetops, becoming a dot in the distance, a speck in the sky, the helicopter glinting in the sunlight.
For a while, my father called her Helicopter Jean and it made them both smile.
A conker falls. ‘That’s a beauty,’ he says, polishing and pocketing it, pleased. He is like a boy with a champion conker, for whom Beautiful Jean is still in the future, shimmering like a mirage, waiting to be wooed and won.
We have gone wrong somewhere. We don’t recognise this bare clearing. We retrace our steps. He starts to hum, to peck at her songs, but he doesn’t know the words. ‘Heavens above . . .’ he says. ‘Heavens above . . .’
The cancer was like a rat in a pantry, creeping in during the night and spoiling her eyesight, her muscles, her memory.
Beautiful Jean, lying downstairs on a medical bed, tried to remember her hymns. ‘Heaven above . . . Heaven a
bove below below . . . Heaven above . . . Hello?’
‘Hello,’ said my father. ‘Hello, love, we’re here.’
‘Hello?’ said my mother again. ‘Can I come in? How do I get into the box?’
She could barely see us now. We watched her, our eyes gleaming, wondering where she was.
‘It’s all over,’ said my father, later, in the kitchen, bypassing this dying, hurrying out of this jungle and into a bleak place.
When my mother died, my father and I found ourselves standing in what had once been our dining room, surrounded by swabs and pads, plastic sheets and plastic mugs, talking books and wigs. We returned these things to the hospice and the library and tried to remember where we had been before.
I found memories of her secreted in unexpected places: in the bathroom cabinet which smelt of her face soap when I went looking for spare toothpaste, and in the darkness of her wardrobe where her scent lingered on her abandoned clothes. When I found her, I stood still and inhaled, time-travelling.
I took my mother’s ashes to the woods when the bluebells were thick. I trudged along behind my father, wondering which way to go now that nobody here had a map in their head. He carried the pot of ashes like a priest with an incense burner, his old windcheater for a cassock. He tried to sing ‘Leaving on a Jet Plane’ but he only knew the first two lines.
We scattered her ashes around a sycamore tree which was almost in the sun. It seemed as if something momentous ought to happen, but the ashes just fell to the ground, onto the grass and onto our shoes.
There was some graffiti carved into the bark of the tree, near the base.
My father traced its lines and said, ‘What does this mean?’
I told him: ‘True Love For Ever’ and ‘If Destroyed Still True’.
To our right, the woods gave way to a field full of drowsy cows, and beyond it a busy road roared with traffic. We walked back the way we had come, the pot empty in my father’s hands, something precious left behind, just out of reach of the sun.