(2016)The Tidal Zone

by Sarah Moss

  The head of department replied that, while he whole-heartedly deplored the use of Central American farmland to grow corn for the lids of coffee cups rather than sustenance crops for Central American farmers and had in fact signed the students’ petition, he felt it important to offer tea and coffee at the workshop to colleagues who, having travelled from other institutions, would already be alarmed and dismayed by the experience of attempting to reach campus. He believed that presenting the University and the project in a welcoming and professional manner, especially given some of the recent and damaging publicity generated by certain members of the department, on this occasion might reasonably take priority over concerns about the students’ opinions of the lids on coffee cups. The secretary and the nice woman from Architecture smiled at each other, which made James McClary bang the desk. It was, he said, intolerable to see students’ proper concerns about global food security and sustainable development mocked by those to whom corporate image mattered more than education in this country or the lives of Central American farmers.

  Jenny extracted another Playmobil knight and began to menace the one I held on my knee. Professor McClary, I thought, do you know that children stop breathing and then their hearts stop? Do you know that while you are performing this mildly entertaining routine, any of our children or partners or friends could be dropping dead for no reason? Le cœur a ses raisons que la raison ne connaît point, Professor. He was talking again. I could almost hear the head of department whinny. I made my knight turn on Jenny’s and lunge under its shield. Simon spoke, and Jenny’s knight parried and tried to leap onto the brown envelope on her lap, but my knight spun and raised his sword-arm. Will you stop flirting, Em would have said, just because you’re the primary carer doesn’t mean you get to chat up all the mums, but Jenny is happily enough married and actually being a stay-at-home dad does mean I get to talk to women in a way that Dave, for example, does not. Maybe, I thought, Simon and Professor Contrary could fight with the Playmobil while the rest of us do some work. It is not clear to me why this mode of passing time is considered more noble or manly than cleaning the loo. I would rather have been with my daughter.

  time passed

  Miriam went back to school.

  I should have been pleased, as I used to be pleased at the end of the summer holidays, to have six hours a day at my own disposal again, to order my time as I saw fit without witnesses. I should have finished the Coventry project and then revised my CV and sent it out again, because there are other universities within commuting distance of our town and even without contemplating the realms of ‘proper jobs’, I could have been earning more money than I did, taking more pressure off Emma.

  The house was too quiet.

  The girls were too far away.

  Every time I heard a siren, I stopped what I was doing and strained to work out which way it was going, towards Miriam’s school or Rose’s. I kept my phone beside me or in my pocket and after a siren had passed, I took it out and held it in my hand, waiting for the call. There’s been an incident.

  I would return from the school run, clear the breakfast dishes off the table and tidy the kitchen, make a cup of tea and set out my laptop and notes and then decide to go upstairs to check the girls’ bedrooms. I had never used to make their beds, but now I found myself plumping pillows and smoothing sheets like a Victorian housemaid, obliterating the shapes of their sleeping heads and growing bodies with the promise of their return. I straightened the piles of books at Miriam’s bedside the way I had once built towers of wooden blocks for her to knock down, and sat Rose’s menagerie of stuffed animals primly against her headboard as if for some strangely formal picnic. I put away the girls’ clean clothes instead of leaving piles on their beds, dusted their bookcases, made sure the blinds on their skylights were fully open and the windows ajar for fresh air; I had seen several suggestions that the rise of asthma in the younger generation is associated with poor ventilation and volatile chemical compounds in new buildings. Where before, I had often been frustrated by the disappearance of my afternoons, by the way 3.15 followed so fast on lunch that I could hardly begin again to write, now I found that the minutes of two o’clock seemed as long as the plateau of late morning.

  I knew that it would have helped me to start running again, but I didn’t. If I wasn’t going to work, I could have repainted the hall, obliterated the small grey finger-marks made by smaller girls who would not come back. I could have printed and framed some of the photos we’d been meaning for years to print and frame, in salutation of time past. I could have planted spring bulbs in blue-glazed pots and begun to try to find travel insurance so that we would be able to go on holiday next year; there is no reason, Dr Chalcott had said, why not. I could have engaged in the kind of pre-Christmas hyperactivity urged upon home-makers in every magazine and shop-window and website, made a wreath for the front door and put up jars of mincemeat.

  I did very little.

  Time passed.

  idiosyncratic economies of guilt, absolution and cultural pressure frankly reminiscent of the medieval church

  A week before the end of term, Rose had a birthday party invitation. You don’t have to go, I said, I know it’s been a long term, I know you’re tired, it’s OK if you’d rather have a quiet weekend at home, I’ll even get the waffle-iron out and make those blueberry waffles for breakfast, we could do some potato-print Christmas cards like last year. Dad, said Mimi, she’s too old for potato-printing and no-one sends Christmas cards any more, haven’t you noticed, they’re an exercise in pointless consumerism anyway, I’ll take her to Bella’s party if you can’t face it. Of course I can face it, I said, do you have any idea how many children’s parties I’ve faced in the last fifteen years, I just don’t want her to feel she has to go if she’s going to have a miserable time. It’s a party, said Rose, of course I won’t have a miserable time, they’ve rented the whole pool and it’s going to have a bouncy castle in it and the wave machine and everyone has to choose if they want chicken nuggets or pizza and chips for tea and Bella doesn’t like reading so please don’t make me give her a book the way you always do because it’s totally embarrassing. OK, I said, fine, I’ll have a look in the present box, although I knew that most of the things in the present box had been in circulation around Rose’s classmates for a couple of years and were really now too young as well as totally embarrassing. There is a kit for making puppets out of socks, which requires the sacrifice of perfectly good socks in order to add to the number of crap toys in the house, and a box of something called ‘science putty’ whose fame precedes it; science toys for girls are of course invariably laudable but the relevance of science to a substance with all the qualities of tar when applied to domestic interiors is unclear.

  I bought a copy of Little House on the Prairie, some more glitter to encourage Rose to make a birthday card and a roll of not-Christmassy wrapping paper, because I could see that having a birthday ten days before Christmas meant that special effort should be made. Emma had come home from work and gone straight to bed the previous night, no dinner thank you, sorry, it was nice of me to cook it for her but she was just too tired, she couldn’t face it, no, not even hot chocolate made from the real thing, not even a cup of tea, sorry.

  On Saturday I had woken early as usual, no birds and little traffic, the house cold but the girls warm and breathing in their beds. I shut the kitchen door and turned the radio on low while I emptied the dishwasher, waiting for the good bakery to open so I could buy croissants for Emma and the girls. The radio said the NHS was at breaking point and, as predicted by its staff, unable to cope with the midwinter surge in acute illnesses; an angry woman described her elderly mother’s last hours on a trolley in a hospital corridor. We had no beds, a manager said, we did the best we could to care for her but we had no beds, we are understaffed and underfunded. The Americans and the Russians had been bombing the people they wanted to bomb and may or may not have hit other people as well. A right-wing British politician had
been recorded airing racist views from which his party wished to distance itself. Ten thousand people were dying of hunger and cold on top of a mountain where they had fled enemies intent on genocide; other people dropping aid parcels from helicopters had had cold, sick babies pushed into their arms and had had to hand them back and fly away. And now over to Gary for the sport.

  I finished the dishwasher and then noticed that the sink needed cleaning, and by the time I’d done that and crept upstairs for a load of laundry it was time to go for the croissants. The damp cold and the weight of the winter night on the sky reminded me of running. This time last year I had been going out at the same time, my breath my ghost companion as I ran through the sleeping streets and out across fields glazed with frost.

  As I came back down the road, I saw that the kitchen light was on, ours the only house on the close showing signs of wakefulness, although at the bakery there had been two hollow-eyed dads pushing cheerful toddlers in buggies. It gets better, I wanted to tell them. One day you will not spend the first few hours of every Saturday waiting for the sun to rise so you can go to the playground. You will not be wanting your lunch before most people have had breakfast and indulging in wild fantasies involving four hours of uninterrupted sleep.

  Emma had got up and dressed and was at the table with a cup of tea and her iPad. I kissed her, my lips cold on her mouth.

  ‘I bought croissants. And I got you a pain au chocolat. Should still be warm, you should eat it before the girls come down.’ I put down the bag and began to take plates from the cupboard. ‘We can have a romantic French breakfast to get the weekend off to a good start.’

  She pulled her gaze from the screen. ‘You’re sweet. Thank you. Have you seen what they’re saying about nurses? They have no idea, do they, none at all. They think—’

  ‘Em?’ I said. ‘Could we maybe not talk about the health service? Just while we eat our croissants? I agree with you, you know that, but just for half an hour could you not be a doctor?’

  I saw her face change. She is a doctor, the way priests are priests. It’s not a suit that you put on to go to work and take off when you come home.

  ‘I don’t mean don’t be a doctor. I mean don’t be an employee. Let’s not talk about institutions. Sorry, Em, I’m being daft. Here, more tea? We should talk about Christmas.’

  As if talking about Christmas were ever a soothing bonding experience for a couple with parents and children. We had already agreed that we were not going to Emma’s sister, not this year. Emma said it wasn’t fair on Clare, having to do the whole thing year after year, their parents after twenty-five years of divorce still sniping over mealtimes and walks. I rather felt that Clare might have to continue to face the disadvantages of owning a six-bedroom house in a Cheshire commuter town, but Emma was looking thinner and more tired with every passing week and I couldn’t bear the idea of her spending two of her four days off packing and travelling. And then the girls said no, not Aunt Clare’s house, please not Aunt Clare’s house, it’s so boring and George is horrible and Uncle Rob watches sport all the time. So we were staying at home. Miriam’s still fragile, we said, and Emma’s working Christmas Eve, next year we’ll all get together, maybe even rent a big cottage on the coast, take the pressure off Clare. (Next year, I thought, we will bugger off to Cornwall and see my dad, celebrate Hanukkah or the solstice in some ideologically and environmentally defensible manner, but I saw no reason to mention that plan while next year was twelve months away.)

  Emma sipped her tea. ‘I thought we could tell the girls we can do whatever they want as long it doesn’t cost much and means we can start and end the day at home. We don’t have to have turkey or Christmas pudding and you don’t have to spend the day cooking.’

  I opened the jam. Last year’s, home-made with damsons from the side of the golf course. ‘I really don’t want to cook a turkey. Especially not for four of us. It’d be occupying the freezer for months.’

  ‘I like the bits,’ Emma said. ‘Bread sauce and the little sausages and things.’

  ‘They can all be made in advance. It could be a holiday activity. We could just have those.’

  ‘Take them somewhere. A Christmas picnic.’

  ‘Nowhere’s open. Well, except on campus for the poor befuddled international students. And you know it will probably rain.’ I imagined the four of us huddling on a bench beside the crater that is to be the Major Donor Business School, passing cold chipolatas under a driving rain and trying to convince each other that we were being radical. ‘Let’s just stay at home,’ I said. ‘We can go for a canal walk or something in the afternoon if Rose is bouncing off the walls.’

  It’s not a figure of speech, in Rose’s case.

  ‘Be nice to have a day off making them put their shoes and coats on, wouldn’t it?’ Emma broke her pain au chocolat in half. ‘I’ll save some for the girls, I shouldn’t be having cake for breakfast anyway. By the way, I can do the party today, if you like.’

  I looked at her. She, like most sane adults, loathes the carnival of mass greed and hyperactivity with which the first ten birthdays are celebrated, but she is also sensitive about her habitual absence from the school gates, and is occasionally moved to attempt to compensate by making ridiculous commitments to the PTA and dragging herself to Mums’ Nights Out where the conversation is all about the inadequacy of husbands and she gets told repeatedly how lucky she is that I help her with the children and allow her to work full-time.

  ‘Do you actually want to?’ I asked. ‘I mean, setting aside any – ah – idiosyncratic economies of guilt, absolution and cultural pressure frankly reminiscent of the medieval church that might be running in your head?’

  She was eating her pastry! ‘Do shut up about the medieval church. No. Really I want to take Mimi into the city for Christmas shopping and an edgy Bohemian lunch. I hate swimming. But you don’t have to do all the boring things.’

  I shrugged. ‘I had loads of time with Mimi. And I don’t think I’d recognise an edgy Bohemian lunch if I met it on the streets of Prague.’

  ‘Yeah. Well, it was that and the changing room thing.’

  ‘Oh.’

  The changing room thing is that the father of daughters too young to be sent alone into the women’s changing room with any serious expectation that they will emerge at the other end appropriately washed and attired and having left their clothes somewhere dry must take them with him into the men’s room. Even stay-at-home dads who know how to use the delicates cycle on the washing machine and clean a toilet before it needs doing can’t go into the women’s changing room. The power dynamic between small girls and a room full of naked men is not, under these circumstances, the obvious way round, and the men don’t like it, and can’t get angry with the girls. Look here, mate, I’m not being funny, I’ve got my own little girl, but do you see her in here? I am fairly sure that the mothers of small boys have an easier time in the other room, although I know that is partly because the difference in social and political power between adult women and little boys is much smaller than the difference between adult men and little girls. I am not suggesting that it is generally, taking any view wider than that of a provincial leisure centre, better to be a woman.

  ‘There’ll be plenty of mums there,’ I said. ‘And if not, she’ll just have to cope. It’s not a reason for you and Mim to miss your lunch. Though good luck with the shopping.’

  She shook her head. She’d stopped eating after less than half a pain au chocolat. ‘Sherratt & Hughes. Credit card. Anyone who thinks they don’t want books just hasn’t found the right one yet. I’m not going anywhere else, it’s two Saturdays before Christmas and I’ll have a Marxist eco-warrior with me, I’m not stupid.’

  ‘I never imagined that you were. Have a croissant.’

  ‘I’m fine, thanks. I’m going to wake the girls or they’ll stay up all night and we’ll never get to talk.’

  We could talk now, I thought, if you would stay at the table with me, if you would eat th
e breakfast I went out to buy for you, if you were capable, these days, of rest and food.

  watching the kiddies like that

  The pool was probably no worse than usual. You can smell the chlorine from the car park, which is quite reassuring once you get through the lobby with its vending machines – quick, replace any calories you might have used before you leave the building – past the desk where the angry women keep guard, down the barely lit stairs, through the paste of mud and hair on the changing room floors and out into the brutal lighting and echoing screams of the pool itself, where old plasters bob like driftwood against the handrails and toddlers pause furtively at the shallow end. It is odd that the aural effect of excited children at play is roughly what one might expect in one of the outer circles of hell. Adam, you don’t have to get wet if you don’t want to, Bella’s mum had said, though if you don’t mind staying that would be great, just in case any of the boys need taking to the loo or anything. It is my life’s calling, I did not say, to escort other people’s sons to the loo. It is my service to society.