Love After Love

by Alex Hourston

  ‘It was a tiny scrap. Some bullshit.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Always and forever,’ she said. ‘I mean—’

  ‘That’s me,’ I said.

  ‘You what?’

  ‘It must have been from years ago. It’s a thing we used to say. When Mum and Dad split up.’

  ‘Well I’m sorry, but that is all kinds of fucked-up,’ she replied.

  ‘Not really. We were children—’

  She must have dropped her hand from her mouth; her laugh sounded miles away.

  ‘Shall I come round?’ I called.

  I went to their home the next day. It wasn’t a bad place, a second-floor flat in a squat block off Wells Park Road. The ground floor was all garages, painted green, next to an area that had been turfed in a fake-looking grass, prickly and bright, like the stuff they lay the meat on at the butcher’s. Satellite dishes ran around the block in three tiers, each fixed at an identical tilt which made me think of sunflowers raising their faces to the light. I stood outside and counted up and along until I found David’s home. Theirs was one of the smaller flats, so didn’t warrant a balcony. There was the same wisp of curtain as always.

  We’d been here once before, Stef and I, and eaten Mexican, taco and enchilada sitting on cushions round a low table. Tequila with the worm still in, which someone had given them, and mariachi music that David had burned onto a disk. Next-door joined us, late; a white man with dreadlocks and flared jeans, and his spacey girlfriend, and I squeezed Stef’s hand at the sight of them but he wouldn’t acknowledge it. On the way home, when pushed, he just said: ‘Live and let live, hey, babe.’

  Skyler buzzed me up wordlessly and I took the stairs, a slippery wood laminate peppered with heel marks. She had opened the door before I got there, in slippers and one of his old jumpers.

  ‘Hi,’ she said. ‘Are you early?’

  She gestured at me with her bowl, a fork upright in noodles. ‘There’s probably more. If you want it,’ she said.

  ‘I’m fine,’ I replied. ‘I’ll eat when I get home.’

  She turned into the hall. Overhead someone crossed the floor heavily.

  ‘Do you want a tea? Or I might have some wine, I suppose,’ she said.

  ‘A tea’s good, thanks.’

  ‘Go through. I’ll put the kettle on.’

  I sat on the sofa, old pilled wool you could feel the springs through. The room was square and white and unadorned. It showed its function everywhere, in the wires that had worked free of their tacking and the pull for the blinds split out into a fuzz of grubby fibres. There was damp in the wall shared with the bathroom that I smelt before I saw, bubbling under the paintwork in one corner. A beanbag was the only thing recognisably his, a gift from Mads that had somehow survived. I noticed two framed posters from movies I’d never seen, and a laptop on a desk next to a messy pile of papers.

  ‘I added milk,’ she said. ‘We don’t have sugar.’

  She put the tea by my foot and sat cross-legged at their table to eat.

  ‘Skyler,’ I said, finally. ‘I just wanted to check you were OK.’

  ‘Why?’ she said.

  ‘Well, on the phone, I thought you sounded a bit—Overwrought.’

  ‘Overwrought? Your brother fucking abandoned me.’ She went back to eating steadily.

  ‘I know.’

  There was a pinboard on the desk, leant against the wall, part hidden by the swamp of filing. Postcards and cuttings. Beach, jungle and city. Meals and views and water. I’d put together similar – a collation of my adventures – to take with me to university. David had watched as I assembled it, a dry run on the floor to see what should go where.

  ‘Tell me about. This place,’ he would say and point.

  If I couldn’t think of anything, I made it up.

  ‘Planning a trip?’ I asked Skyler.

  ‘We were,’ she said. ‘Did he not say?’

  *

  He had got bored, after a while, flicking through my clippings.

  ‘Why are you taking all this stuff, anyway?’ he asked.

  ‘To remind me,’ I replied.

  ‘Then why not an album?’

  ‘Why not this?’ I said, my colour rising.

  ‘Because it’s not for you,’ he said, ‘is it? It’s for other people. To make you seem more interesting than you are. Do you think it’ll work?’

  I wanted him to rip it up then, to save me the job, but David, when he chooses, has magnificent restraint. So I did it myself, scrunched the whole lot into my bin. He laughed.

  ‘Shall we burn it?’ he said.

  ‘We’ll burn the whole house down.’

  He went off for lighter fuel. The flame was sudden and columned and heated my necklace so instantly that it burnt my chest. The bin seemed to thrum and I thought it would tip – surely – then it was gone; the fire sucked back into itself like magic.

  ‘No, he didn’t actually,’ I told Skyler.

  ‘Oh right,’ she said. ‘He felt that was your thing, travelling. That’s probably why.’ She stretched her leg and turned an ankle. Under the table, I saw one of David’s boots. A sock hung from the collar.

  ‘Well, it was,’ I said.

  ‘Did you never wonder why he didn’t go, though? When you were growing up?’ she asked, and I realised that I hadn’t.

  ‘I guess he just didn’t fancy it,’ I said.

  She puffed a breath out of her nose. ‘Well he fancies it now,’ she replied, but any fight had dropped out of me and I just felt sad for my brother and the things he hadn’t done. She took her bowl through to the kitchen. The high-pile rug had left her leggings lightly furred.

  ‘Look I’m just here to help, if I can.’

  ‘But why?’ she said, and turned to me, her movements sudden and complete, like a cat’s. ‘You don’t even like me.’

  I felt bloated in my suit and thought, at home they’re out of milk, and Lou has lost her French, and Stef needed reminding to take Jake’s snack. As for Frieda, I don’t care if it’s normal, I feel her distance from me like a thumb twisted in a wound.

  ‘I need to leave,’ I said, and switched my laptop bag to the shoulder that ached a little less.

  ‘Fine,’ she called after me. ‘And don’t come back. I don’t want your help.’

  She was in the hall now, shouting after me down into the stairwell.

  ‘I refuse to be one of your good works, Saint Nancy. His words,’ I heard her shout above the rat-a-tat of my shoes, ‘not mine.’

  But I didn’t go home, I took a bus instead, heading the opposite way. The lower deck was quiet and I sat by the window behind the driver, listening to the engine’s build and drop and the percussion of the gears which I could feel beneath me as well as hear. The repetition made me sleepy. In the seat behind, a schoolboy crushed a bag of crisps into dust before he ate them.

  We moved into a part of South London I didn’t know. The place looked poor yet felt suburban and the tempo was changed, there was less hurry out here. I felt the neighbourhood’s boredom and it slowed me down again. I allowed myself a daydream. I imagined Adam and I running away to this place. They wouldn’t follow me here. There was nothing in these streets for Stefan or the kids. He wouldn’t find his coffee, or a work hub or discover something awesome that was local, artisan or niche. There were no tutors or green spaces. It’s not that Stef would condescend, if he found himself passing through; God no. He wouldn’t speed up as the roads got grimmer, or flip the locks. Just move our big car steadily on, telling the kids: ‘Don’t worry, team, we’ll get where we’re going soon enough,’ and somebody would want a wee, or a treat, or to change the song, or take their turn in the front but he’d smooth all that away and they’d keep rolling through, until: ‘Here we are,’ and they were out the other side. Perhaps they would come upon a van selling hand-thrown pizza, or find that the road had opened out into a square of better housing and pull up outside a newsagent on the corner, each child leaning down to choose an out-of-sea
son ice-cream from the chest that took them back to holidays. And they would forget about me, who had watched them go by from behind a scrap of something I’d nailed up to keep out the light.

  I could live here, in this place. I had forgotten that I was adaptable, the surprise legacy from the collision that had been Mum and Dad and which I’d once considered my greatest gift. But they are not. It has been my life’s work to root my children deep. Their selves have been my project, winkled out then smoothed and polished till they are shiny and certain and impermeable. They are fixed now, and a transplant would be brutal, maybe even fatal. I, though, could still imagine invisibility; the lovely freedom of it. I could live here with Adam, pulled out from under the weight of my own expectations. Everything I needed within arm’s reach.

  The boy behind me got up, a little shower of crisps tumbling from his lap as he passed. I pressed the bell for the next stop.

  In the street, on a whim, I googled David’s work. I dialled the number and someone answered in a gasp on the final ring. I heard a big echoey space behind him.

  *

  More work than time, David had said, from my sofa, drinking wine at 5 p.m., and all sorts – you name it – kitchens, wardrobes; in fact, sis, he said, and he bent across his lap at this, an odd set to his face, just recently, a headboard shaped like a sleigh, for a girl, just like you always wanted. Remember? It was beautiful. He wished I could have seen it.

  *

  ‘David?’ said the man, ‘Hold on.’

  *

  He told a long tale at a new Japanese, about a set he was building, for the stage, he declared, how cool is that? He described a field of trees; oak, ash and beech, accurate to each leaf, painted by a mate.

  I remarked upon the cost, high for regional theatre, perhaps.

  He said some local guy picked up the bill.

  I said how about we all of us go and watch?

  He told me it was while we were away.

  *

  Then a new voice came on the line. ‘You after David?’ it said.

  ‘Yes please. He gave me this number.’

  ‘Haven’t seen him for months,’ the man replied. ‘Tell him to ring me, though, if you find him,’ he went on. There’s a ton of work, turns out, in flooring and roofs – David’s thing. For a skinny lad, he said, he really can lift. And a lot of people doing up, these days. Cheaper than moving. Then something sounded in my voice and the man put the phone down fast.

  Every lie has an intent. Perhaps David hoped to make us proud. Mum loved it, of course, to have at least one creative child, though Dad didn’t understand; he thought it a step backwards in our family’s passage. Unless David wanted my envy. To see my own life shrivel a bit, next to his. I caught the next bus home.

  18

  I went with my mother to look at art. She had been waiting for this show for months, on life-drawing, her passion, if such a word could be applied, and had bought a ticket for David too, who liked this kind of thing. In his absence, she offered it to Madeline, but Mads had phoned me earlier in an anxious state, struck with a vicious cold and convinced that Mum should not be forced to visit a gallery alone.

  ‘She does everything alone, Madeline,’ I said.

  ‘I know. That’s what I mean,’ she cried.

  The office felt loaded and unstable. Adam had asked me if anything was wrong and I told him no, but couldn’t meet his eye. I had no clients after lunch and so agreed to go, with a view to making an effort.

  *

  I met Mum off the first cheap train. She wore the satchel she used for London strapped across her chest and a pair of comfortable shoes. We walked the distance to the gallery.

  The exhibition was in the basement, dark and quiet and temperature-controlled. It was empty and our feet made echoey taps and our voices bounced around. I enjoyed the flirtatious letters between the artists and models, but struggled to extract meaning from the art, which just looked like pictures to me. In the third room, Mum slowed down.

  ‘Look at this, Nancy,’ she said. ‘Lovely, don’t you think?’

  The drawing was a seated nude. Chalk on paper; bronze strokes on a page of light ochre as though it had been singed. The woman was viewed from behind and her head, in profile, was shaded out.

  ‘Where’s her face?’ I asked, but my mother ignored me. The figure was drawn simply, in rough even strokes. She was muscled and strong, in the bulge of her calf, across her shoulders and through the curve of her hip which cut a deep cleft into her waist. She looked powerful, a woman who might simply get up and put herself to work. My mother did not. She stood close to the art, her programme pressed to her front. Her face was still and she had slowed her eyes and passed them quietly across the canvas, left to right, blank and thorough; she stayed that way for minutes, entirely passive, waiting to receive the message of the work. Her undyed hair tapered into fine points resting across each clavicle. Her tunic and trousers, in natural shades of taupe and mustard, were unfilled. She looked like a nun on a day out in home clothes. I took a seat on the bench behind her, my head in my phone, reloading and refreshing though there was no connection down there. In the end, I got up and nudged her, more roughly than I’d intended.

  ‘Come on, Mum,’ I said. ‘I haven’t got all day.’

  She swayed a little as she absorbed the blow, but her feet remained steady.

  ‘I’ll meet you in the café, Nancy,’ she replied.

  ‘What do you want?’ I said.

  ‘A latte, please, when I get there,’ she said, her eyes still on the art.

  She didn’t rush. I had finished my coffee by the time she arrived, and chosen lunch. She pulled the bottom of her tunic aside and sat.

  ‘We need to order, Mum,’ I said.

  ‘I’ll have the soup.’

  ‘You don’t even know what it is.’

  ‘It’ll be fine, thank you, and oatcakes, please, instead of bread, if they’ve got them.’

  She took a small bottle of water from her bag and drank a sip. I found a waitress, and ordered for us both.

  ‘And how are the children?’ Mum said.

  ‘OK. I think,’ I replied.

  She’d swapped to her other glasses and I had her full attention now. Her skin was perfect, sealed and poreless, white and fine like muslin. The bridge of her nose, knobbed as a knucklebone, wore a skein of fine red scratches.

  ‘There’s been something with Frieda,’ I said. ‘She seems quiet.’

  I hadn’t planned to tell her, but her eyes on me, light and constant, made it happen.

  ‘She is quiet. You were quiet,’ she said.

  ‘Me?’

  ‘Yes, Nancy. You. Some of the time. When you let yourself be.’

  I remembered action, effort, making a production of it, to winkle David out, or get a smile from Dad. He came to watch me play netball on a Saturday afternoon and would stand at the chain link fence, in the sunglasses he wore with less self-consciousness than the other dads, ankles crossed, one toe tipped into the ground. He was smarter, too, in his weekend things, and the parting in his hair and the press of his collar showed his difference far more than his accent. Knowing he was there made me ruthless; I looked him out when I got done for contact, ready to collect my wink. I found an extra inch at the sound of his holler, though it made me wince as well. ‘You’re a force of nature,’ Dad used to say. I heard it, I liked it, stuck my flag in it. David had to choose from what was left. Childhood as land grab.

  *

  ‘I always think of David as the quiet one, growing up,’ I said.

  ‘Yes, I know you do,’ she said and there it was, the pinch at the end of her caress. It was a reflex, and I saw her almost instant regret. I was filling the space made by Dad leaving, I almost said, but it would be hard to come back from that.

  ‘So are you worried about Frieda?’ she asked, in a step towards me.

  ‘Honestly? I’ve no idea.’

  ‘What does Stefan say?’ she asked. For a woman so many years alone she still
set store by the opinion of a man.

  ‘He thinks she’s fine.’

  She nodded and reset the cutlery, straightening her soup spoon and knife and refolding the white paper napkin. She moved the flower that sat between us – a single light-deprived stem in a test-tube – to the table next door, and said:

  ‘That’s better. I can see you now.’

  Her soup came, a thin grim broth. She stirred it, setting vegetables bobbing, and waited, her spoon planted deep, for mine to arrive. The same girl brought it over; a vast ham and Gruyère toastie beside a heaped ramekin of tomato chilli chutney. Mum frowned at the sandwich, its size, or else the dribble of cheese establishing itself on the plate in its moat of grease. She brought her spoon up and across to her mouth neatly.

  ‘Would you like a taste?’ I offered, and shoved the sandwich towards her. It sagged around my grip, threatening to leak.

  ‘No, thanks,’ she replied, with a hint of recoil.

  ‘Oh whoops,’ I said, as a teardrop of cheese hit her napkin. She folded it and tucked it under the rim of her plate.

  ‘Did you talk to David at the party?’ I asked.

  ‘Not so much, dear, no. But I felt that he seemed OK.’

  ‘I met Skyler the other day. She was no help,’ I said.

  ‘Ah well. Have you thought of Alice? That pair had a chat.’

  ‘I saw. Not for long, though. I’m not doing it, this time, Mum. Phoning around.’

  ‘Fair enough,’ she replied.

  ‘Don’t you feel hurt by him leaving again?’

  She laid down her spoon and pushed her half-drunk soup away. ‘I don’t see his decision in those terms, Nancy,’ she said.

  ‘What terms?’

  ‘In terms of how they affect me.’

  ‘So you’re saying I’m being selfish?’ I said.

  Louisa shares my mother’s face, wan and pious. It pained me, now, to look at hers, so similar to my child’s, and feel that stab of dislike.