Everything and Nothing

by Araminta Hall

  ‘Sorry,’ Ruth was saying now, ‘I’m sure I said. Anyway, Mum’s super organised, she’s not a bit like me, she’ll be a great help.’

  Tears stung Agatha’s eyes at this new information. A fussy grandmother as well as a useless mother, all fucking up her neatly laid plans. Hal started calling from upstairs and so she responded.

  Ruth put a hand on her arm. ‘Don’t worry, Aggie, I’ll go. It’s not often I get to give the kids breakfast.’

  Agatha’s mouth flailed like a fish drowning in oxygen, but what could she say?

  Ruth made her way up the stairs to the sound of her son. It had been an effort to be jolly for those few short minutes and she wondered how she was going to survive the day. She looked at her watch, it was only just after seven. Why was Aggie up? But then again, she must always be, Ruth realised. When she flew into the kitchen at seven thirty everything was always neatly laid out, Betty already eating, tea in the pot. How quickly she’d let this happen. She’d never asked Aggie to do breakfast or to get the kids up, but somehow this had become something which she did every day. Ruth felt panicked at how easily she’d let Aggie take such an important part of the day from her. Or maybe it was the other way around, maybe it was how easily Ruth had surrendered it.

  Hal’s room was dark from his blackout blind and he was sitting up in his cot, his hair sticking up from his head, shouting some indiscernible word. Ruth went and sat next to him, drawing in his fug of sleep. She put her hand on his cheek.

  ‘Hello, love, did you sleep well?’

  Hal looked at her, stunned. He shouted again, but she couldn’t make it out. Ruth tried to pull him onto her lap but he pushed her away. ‘Gie,’ it sounded like, but then she was sure he said, ‘Mummy.’

  ‘I’m here, darling,’ she said, feeling her heart beating faster. She’d always worried that one day Hal would wake up and his weirdness would have to be acknowledged.

  He was still pushing her away. ‘Mummy.’

  ‘Hal,’ she said, holding him by the shoulders. ‘It’s me, I’m here. Mummy’s here.’

  Christian put his head round the door. ‘What’s going on?’

  ‘I don’t know, I think he’s having some sort of fit. He’s calling for me, but it’s like he can’t see me.’

  Christian came over and felt Hal’s head. ‘He’s not hot.’ He knelt down. ‘What’s up, mate? Mummy’s here.’

  Hal kicked his foot into Christian’s face. ‘Go way. Mummy.’

  ‘Let’s get him downstairs,’ said Christian. ‘It might wake him up a bit.’ He picked him up, kicking and screaming and they made their way into the kitchen. Aggie was buttering toast, her face as tight as a stretched canvas. As soon as Hal saw her he lunged at her, pushing Christian away with all his strength.

  ‘Mummy,’ he shouted, over and over, the sound bouncing off the walls, cracking into all their heads.

  Aggie went to him, like they were in slow motion, and he leapt into her arms, collapsing on her shoulder, weeping into her neck. ‘Shh,’ she was saying, ‘what’s all this about, silly?’

  Ruth was shaking. She didn’t know what she’d seen or how to react to it. ‘Did he call you Mummy?’ she asked as calmly as she could.

  Aggie looked up. ‘No, did he? I didn’t hear that.’ But she was pale and Ruth was sure she was lying.

  ‘I heard,’ said Betty. ‘He said “Mummy”.’

  ‘Has he ever said that before, Betty?’ asked Ruth.

  Betty spooned some cereal onto the table and shrugged. ‘I don’t know. He’s stupid, he gets everything wrong.’ All the adults ignored this.

  Ruth looked directly at Aggie and knew she had found something worse than Sarah. ‘Have you heard him say that before, Aggie?’

  ‘No, are you sure you didn’t mishear? I mean, Aggie, Mummy, they sound pretty similar.’

  ‘No, I heard it as well,’ said Christian. Ruth looked at her husband, standing there still in yesterday’s suit, looking like he hadn’t slept and wondered what levels of shit they were in. You think it’s one thing and then you realise that it’s piled over your head, as high as a mountain.

  ‘Look, it’s nothing. Honestly, if I hear him do it again, I’ll say something. But he is with me a lot and he’d just woken up. He was probably confused.’ She shifted Hal onto her hip and Ruth flinched at the ease of the movement. ‘I’ll get them dressed. Come on, Betty, or we’ll be late for school.’

  Ruth let them leave the room because she wasn’t sure how many options she had. ‘What the fuck was that?’ she asked Christian.

  ‘Probably nothing. I’m sure Aggie’s right.’

  ‘The path of least resistance again, Christian.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I mean, our son just called his nanny Mummy and freaked out when we tried to touch him and you’re happy to sweep it under the carpet because it makes your life easier.’

  ‘So what do you think it is then?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ Ruth sat down, she felt spent. ‘He probably wishes she was his mother or maybe she’s a psycho who gets them to call her Mummy when we’re not around. I don’t know any more.’

  Christian tried to put his hand on her shoulder but she shook him off. ‘Look, we’re both very tired and emotionally done in. Why don’t we get through this weekend and talk to Aggie next week. Nothing’s going to happen between now and then, she’s not even going to be alone with them.’

  Ruth was too tired to cry. ‘Okay. Now please, go to work, I still can’t stand the sight of you.’

  Agatha had stars before her eyes and her breath would only come in short, sharp gasps. She leant over Hal’s drawers and tried to pull the air into her lungs. Someone was coming up behind her and that someone was going to get her. She leapt, tasting her own heartbeat, the scream forming on her lips, but it was only the cat. She had to get a grip on herself, Ruth could come up any minute now.

  She looked down at Hal, so innocently playing with his cars on the floor and wanted to shake him and gather him into her arms all at once. The love he showed her, the need he had for her, the preference over his own mother, it was all heart-breakingly wonderful, but at the same time so scary. He could give them away at any minute, maybe he already had. The look on Ruth’s face had been one of knowledge, knowledge that you can’t bear to admit to yourself. She’d seen that look once before.

  When she was eleven Harry went away, no one ever told her where, but there had been a blissful six months where Agatha allowed herself to believe that he wasn’t coming back. It had felt like the calmness after a great storm, which was a phrase she’d only heard a few years ago, but had immediately recognised as what she had experienced then. But weather patterns persist and storms always eventually return.

  She’d been in her room when someone had knocked at her door and she’d breezily shouted for them to come in because she’d grown used to letting down her guard. But there he was, leering round her bedroom door, his revolting lascivious smile on his lips. He came into the room, shutting the door behind him, leaning his immense weight back onto it, preventing any means of escape. Agatha could see the sweat on his face, his belly straining at his T-shirt, the dirt on the front of his jeans. It was strange how she still remembered all these details and so many others, so clearly it was like a bright light illuminating everything too harshly. But it was also strange how her perception had changed over the years. She saw the same things but she understood them differently. She presumed this would change again, that over and over the image of Harry and what he had done to her would shift and blur, so that she would have to re-live it for the rest of her life.

  Have you missed me, princess? he’d asked, and looking back she saw that he had been nervous, when on that day he’d seemed like an immense and powerful presence, something which couldn’t be denied. She hadn’t answered, but he’d gone on. God, I’ve missed you, he’d said, it’s lonely over there and you kept dancing in my head. Agatha had put down her book at this information. All the time she
’d thought she’d been free of him she’d been dancing in his head? Maybe Harry had been right, she did want it as much as him, she did love him.

  He came closer, blotting out all the available light, menacing above her. He put his hand on her cheek and brushed away a tear she hadn’t known she’d been crying. Then the door opened and her mum walked in.

  ‘What are you doing in here?’ she’d said, much too lightly. ‘I thought you were going to the toilet and then I came up to get my cardi and there was no one in the bathroom.’

  That was the moment. The moment when Agatha could have told the truth and her mother would have believed her and Harry would have been put in prison.

  ‘I wanted to say hi to Agatha,’ he said. ‘Hasn’t she grown since I’ve been away.’

  Agatha’s mother stepped closer to the bed. Her eyes darted nervously between her daughter and her husband’s oldest friend. ‘She has, hasn’t she. She’s getting to be a proper young woman.’

  Harry and her mother loomed over her and Agatha looked up at the woman who was meant to protect her, forcing her to look back. Their eyes met and her mother’s gaze twitched away. It’s true, Agatha was saying, everything you’ve seen and much, much more is true. It’s worse than you could imagine in your most terrible nightmares.

  ‘Anyway, come down now, Harry,’ her mother said. ‘Peter’ll be home in a minute and I want to see the photos before you two get going.’

  They left together, but before she went she looked back into the room. Agatha often wondered what she’d seen. How she could look at that scared little girl sitting on the bed and not choose to save her. Because when her mother shut the door and left her, allowing the soft murmur of conversation to drift up from downstairs, was when Agatha knew that no one was going to save her, that from now on it was all up to her.

  Agatha had always suspected that mothers have some form of inner knowledge, that after you give birth you become more powerful, more capable and that you can either use that knowledge or choose to ignore it. Most of the mothers she had encountered ignored it and it seemed to make them miserable, not to mention their children.

  She picked out Hal’s shorts and T-shirt and knelt down next to him, easing his fragile body out of his pyjamas. ‘Only one more day, sweetheart,’ she said, ‘and then everything will be okay again.’

  Ruth was thirteen when she asked her parents one summer night after supper, sitting in their country garden, what stars were. She didn’t know what answer she’d been expecting, but certainly it had nothing to do with the tale of long-dead, burnt-out planets, their fire already extinguished. ‘All we see,’ she would always remember her father saying, ‘is the image of their last explosion, which has travelled down millions of light years to appear in our sky. What you call a star isn’t real, there’s nothing there, it’s like the light you see if someone takes a photo too close and the flash goes off in your face.’

  ‘Did the planets have people on?’ she’d asked.

  ‘We don’t know,’ her father had replied, ‘but it seems pretty unlikely that all of this is only for us, don’t you think?’ It was the first time Ruth could pinpoint feeling as if she was falling when she was sitting still; a whoosh through her brain as she tried to take in something bigger than her capacity to understand. Now she got the feeling constantly, in editorial meetings, choosing yoghurt in supermarket aisles, in deserted winter playgrounds.

  Her mother had broken the spell that night by saying, ‘Oh, George, I do think it’s mean to be too honest sometimes. My father told me they were the sequins in a giant ballerina’s ballgown and I believed it for years.’ Ruth hadn’t been sure which story was more preposterous.

  The night sky had made Ruth uneasy since then. Not so as she was scared of it, and she could go for months, years even, without thinking about it. But if ever she did stare upwards on a clear night and see all those beautiful twinkling lights, she’d get a sudden stab of panic as she realised that their whole world was surrounded by death and destruction. The knowledge was like the definition of the word bittersweet, that something so truly magical could also be so abominably sad. That the vision which had inspired poets and lovers the world over didn’t even exist. She’d written quite a good essay at university on how ironic this was and how you could interpret the whole metaphor into a description of love, which was in itself ironic. She could write a much better essay now.

  For a short time in her late teens she’d became interested in astronomy. She’d studied the positions of the stars and the shapes they formed and could identify most of the constellations. She’d asked for a good telescope for her eighteenth birthday, which her parents had duly given her and which now sat unused on the upstairs landing. For that brief period of time she’d felt a fragile sense of peace because so many of the stars appeared so mapped out. The lines between them were so straight and definite and the mathematical calculations attached to them were so sure and true. The problem with maths however is that if you get good at it you soon realise that it’s as lyrical and insubstantial as words on a page, which she turned back to for university as they seemed safer. Everyone expects words to have more than one meaning, to get lost in translation, to change with experience and perception, to float and glide together into sentences which can lose their thread or make an intriguing point. Words were by nature flighty and Ruth could deal with that. What she couldn’t deal with was the idea that numbers also barely knew what they meant. It made the world seem too insubstantial.

  Last night, when she been unable to sleep, she’d got out of bed and looked at the stars. Light pollution had obliterated most of them, but she’d made out a couple of familiar patterns and for a moment they’d comforted her. She’d expected to have her mind blown by them, but instead they’d reassured her with their steady positions. Nothing that happens to you or anyone down there will ever affect us for one millisecond, they seemed to be saying, it’s all so unimportant. And of course, when you compared the breakdown of her marriage with soldiers blown apart on the other side of the world or children beaten to death by their parents in their own homes or half the world dying from curable diseases, then yes, it was meaningless. Except . . . except, exactly what did any of that mean to her? What did it matter? Pictures on screens, words in newspapers. They went in and out of her mind, they touched nerves, but they didn’t settle in her heart. Only Christian and her children had the ability to change the course of her life, to bring her happiness or sadness, to make her feel loved and worthy. It was, she felt, rather a tardy realisation.

  She went back to bed and, as she fell asleep, she wondered if her father had been right and they weren’t alone in the universe and whether or not this would be good or bad. It was true that if this whole creation was for man alone then the burden of responsibility would be great, but if that turned out to be the case then at least there wasn’t anyone to witness what a fuck-up they were making of it all.

  Christian only turned his phone back on when he got off the tube at Green Park. He had thirty-seven missed calls, all from Sarah. He listened to the first few. She alternated between wild, screaming accusations and pathetic, pleading nonsense. He deleted thirty-two without listening to them as he didn’t see any good coming from hearing them. He had learnt something from yesterday, which wasn’t a feeling he could remember having had for a very long time.

  He turned off into the park and dialled Sarah’s number. It rang a few times and then a male voice picked up.

  ‘Is that Christian?’

  Two days ago he would have hung up. ‘Yes, it is.’

  ‘This is Sarah’s father and I don’t know how the bloody hell you’ve got the nerve to call her.’

  ‘I’m sorry, I was ringing to say sorry.’

  ‘For what exactly? For fucking her life up again, for making promises you can’t keep or for being a total and utter shit?’

  ‘All of the above.’

  ‘Have you apologised to your wife again, yet?’

  ‘Mr Ellery, I don
’t think you understand, nothing happened between Sarah and I this time. We met by accident and then we went out for lunch and she told me about the abortion and I felt responsible and it was stupid of me, but I didn’t promise her anything, we didn’t even hold hands.’

  ‘Don’t give me any of your bullshit, Christian.’ The anger in the man’s voice was volcanic, Christian had never heard anyone so furious. He tried to imagine what he would feel like if anyone ever behaved like he had towards Betty and he understood. Telling this man his daughter was in the wrong wasn’t going to help. ‘I hope you realise that you are never speaking to her again.’

  ‘Of course. I want to be with my wife. I was ringing to apologise for how I’ve behaved.’

  ‘Well, that’s very big of you. It’s a shame you didn’t have such a sense of decency when you seduced my twenty-two-year-old daughter the first time around, getting her pregnant and then abandoning her.’

  ‘I know, I’m . . . ’

  ‘Shut the fuck up and listen, for once in your pompous life. Do you know how long it took her to get over you? The low-life scum she ended up with in Australia because she thought she was worthless? And then, when you do meet again, you’re not a big enough man to say, Look we’ve made this mistake once before, I’m not going to put you or my wife through this, let’s shake hands and wish each other luck? No, you have to have one last look – out of curiosity, for Christ’s sake! You’re telling me that nothing happened, that you weren’t interested in having another affair? Oh no, you just wanted to have your ego massaged one last time or assuage some fucked-up sense of guilt.’