In My House

by Alex Hourston

  I had no intention of going to his room but could find no way of telling him, so said I ought at least to call home first. Then I sat in the lounge with my mum and Aunty Fran and made my gin and orange last because getting a second depended on Mum’s mood or my behaviour or rather her perception of my behaviour at the moment she came to make the two of them another. The time we were to meet came and went and I felt a sherbety mix of thrill and dread; power, really, I suppose. The door went and I jumped, but it was only Bet, having done her bit, fed her men and come over to us for her weekend. Mum saw it and recognised something of my state.

  ‘Expecting someone, Margaret?’ she asked and they looked at me, the three of them, slit-eyed.

  A female household meant a girl without protection, so my mother made a point of vigilance. Not that she objected to boys per se, she just didn’t want to see me spoil myself on the wrong sort of boy. In bed that night I felt guilty and tearful but when I told the girls next morning we howled until our knees went, though we avoided Banjo’s for a while, just to be safe.

  I started, and wondered if I had slept for a second and snored.

  ‘Look. We’re nearly there,’ Anja said, and she was right.

  We came into Brighton backwards. It spread up the hills in the minute before we stopped, white terraces broken up by the odd block of colour, pink, lilac and green. It looked like fun.

  The station remained beautiful; lofty and Victorian but smaller too, as things often are when you come back to them and are used, as I am now, to the capital.

  I showed her the roof, curved glass and iron, but she knew of it already and told me, instead, about the recent renovation that she’d read about in her guidebook.

  We were still looking up when it began to rain. Instantly the noise became too much, a frantic drumming, each raindrop amplified. It set the seagulls looping, huge and clawed, fat on dumped chips, and she panicked, just as I had as a child when I first heard this sound. She grabbed my arm and we ran together through the echoing space. My god, when had I last run? My body announced itself, lungs and muscles and heartbeat. Her cry was a high short screech that took off up to the ceiling with the caws of the gulls.

  We stepped out onto the pavement breathing hard and I recoiled in instinct against the smell of piss and perm solution, but it was not there; instead, a rising wet metal, which settled in the back of my mouth. I pulled her across to Divalls, where we used to sit and wait for our rare visitors from London.

  It might have been the dash, but I felt a fluttery sort of euphoria. I bought two sweet teas and began to jabber, about how, in my day, the teaspoons had been attached to the counter by chain. The rain steamed us in, as it had done that first time in Queen’s Park. She said as much, at the moment that I thought it, which turned my mind to lovers, and perhaps hers too.

  We warmed our hands on our mugs, ate two heavy buns and it was time to go. The pier, I’d thought, but it was too wet now. We sat next to the window and I wiped myself a spy-hole. People rushed and dripped outside, and for a moment it could have been London, but the door went and the flat grey gloom of a wet seaside town slipped in. It settled on me and I wondered briefly what it was that I was doing here, in Brighton, with a pregnant teen on a soaking day.

  ‘OK, we need a plan,’ I said.

  ‘Take me to where you grew up!’ she cried, still buoyed along on our earlier mood.

  ‘God, no,’ I said, and heard it come out harsh.

  What a suggestion. What a thing to say. I felt an affront, almost a hurt. I had a sudden sense of the house’s proximity. I wondered if the front door was still blue, if someone had squared off the hedge, and if the new people stood out the front in hard-soled slippers poisoning any green that dared push itself up between the paving.

  ‘Why not?’ she asked and her face showed clearly that this had been her idea all along.

  I thought of sitting here, at this same spot with my mum, aged sixteen, waiting for James, the son of an old friend of hers who had moved up and out. He was considering the university, she told me, taking the syllables carefully, and we were to put him up for the night. She slid her hands off the table.

  ‘Do. Not. Show. Me. Up.’ Marked out on my kneecap.

  She laid them back before her and tapped a tune on the plastic cloth, aware of her nails, reddened to match her lips. They didn’t suit her and when she was still, I could see the rim of her thumbnail, coarse and thickened, beneath the paint.

  ‘Or where Frannie used to live. Or Aunty Bet,’ Anja said, in a fond sort of tone. Favourite characters from a much loved tale.

  ‘It’s just. I don’t. I don’t want to do that,’ I said.

  I realised my mistake; the inevitability of her request. But I could not accede to it. The day assumed its real aspect. I felt the malice of the place all around.

  She looked past me at nothing.

  ‘It was a long time ago,’ I said. ‘They are not there any more.’

  ‘So where is the harm?’ she asked, and we lapsed into a thick silence.

  ‘Have you got the guide?’ I said, in a bit, and she reached into her rucksack and pulled out an exercise book in vertical stripes of cherry and pink.

  ‘Oh.’ She went back to her bag.

  The Time Out, when she found it, had slippy pages, too much detail and illegible print. I couldn’t see it helping but flicked back and forth in the absence of a better idea.

  ‘There,’ said Anja. Her finger moved fast, pinning open a page.

  ‘The Pavilion?’ I said.

  ‘One of your princes lived there.’

  ‘That’s right. We can go if you like.’

  She nodded and I was pleased once again to have pleased her.

  Outside the rain had stopped and the air was zippy.

  ‘Wait for me!’ she said, and I did.

  We started down the hill, like a thousand times before. It was the most direct way, but the coldest too, and the most populated, so I turned into North Laine. We zigzagged round the back of the houses and she exclaimed at the graffiti and the general bohemia of the place. No one I’d ever known had lived here, but still I wrapped my scarf up over my mouth, just in case. I put my arm through hers which I knew she liked and pulled her left and right until we got to the Pavilion.

  We arrived, and I remembered straight away how much I loathed to sightsee. Nothing happens when I stand in an old building, my imagination fails, and I have always struggled to grant this place respect. But Anja was queuing for handsets, her hands wedged uncomfortably into her jeans pockets in a search for coins. I paid for two.

  We lumbered stupidly, focused on the recorded voice. The palace looked cheap, gaudy and imitative, but the narrative had been refreshed and was domestic and gossipy. The experience had changed since my schoolgirl days. The classroom feel of the guided tour, with its back-row opportunities, long gone. What once was shared was now solitary.

  I pressed pause, and looked instead at Anja, rapt and oblivious; there was more pleasure in that. Then we were done, another tea discounted and we stood back outside in the cold. She looked at her watch.

  ‘Maggie, come this way. For the best bit. I don’t know if you know.’

  We turned the corner of the palace, and round the back, on the north side, we found the most beautiful ice-rink. It was huge, sat in purple alien light and smelt of frozen air and spiced wine. I was surprised, I’ll give her that, and this feeling caught a touch in my throat.

  ‘Do you want a go?’ she said.

  ‘Heavens, no. Don’t be ridiculous.’

  ‘OK. You can watch.’

  The bar was long and temporary, a posh marquee theatrically lit in yellows and reds, chinoiserie borrowed from the palace.

  I bought a drink and took a spot close to the edge.

  Anja appeared, walking on her toes across the matting. She reached the ice and pushed off, quite hard, stiff-legged and top half lurching. She travelled for a bit, her feet parallel and static and then began to slow painfully. She came
to a halt and I thought she might be stranded but she bent at the waist and baby-stepped to the side. She looked for me, and gave a wave involving her shoulders. I raised my hand and she started again.

  I went up for more wine. I had to admire Anja’s tenacity. Her approach seemed pretty sensible. For a while she pulled herself round the edge, with a focus on her legs, pushing out on the right foot, letting the left catch up and swapping, suspended and risky. It didn’t take long for her to get it. Then she brought the top half in and for a while seemed to regress, the swinging of her arms over-emphasised and fitful. The trick seemed to lie with the core. When she stood up, back straight, she found her stride. A matter of minutes, and she was almost elegant.

  ‘She’s good, isn’t she!’ said a woman stood close by, and I blushed for the first time in years, whether in pleasure or having been caught at something, I didn’t know. My face felt so livid that I raised a hand to it and sure enough its heat passed into my palm. I left it there.

  ‘Is she your daughter?’ the woman said.

  ‘Oh no!’ I replied. ‘Just a friend.’

  ‘Oh.’ A wrinkle of discomfort above her eye and then she wasn’t alone any more. She started to busy herself, make ready for someone’s approach. The pointless rearranging of chairs and dirty china that some women do.

  I looked, curiosity, nothing more and saw a man approaching; just a man, until I paid a bit more attention and saw that he was wearing my face. The same colour eyes, well-washed cotton blue, spaced just too close; the same pinch at the top of the nose, affirmed in my case by years of wearing glasses; my skin tone – sallow and thickish in texture.

  But it was more the overall effect of him. The skew of his shoulders, the hang of his arms, the suggestion of chippiness. He headed straight for his wife, holding out two drinks. Bill or Charlie, it had to be. One of my cousins, Bet’s sons. Why not? He looked about the right age. Charlie, I’d say. The younger of the two.

  Behind him came two girls in their late teens, my mother’s grand-nieces, then, though the sight of them would have seen her tightening, handbag to her chest, eyes markedly elsewhere. They were pierced, through eyebrow and nose respectively. The first had her hair shaved to the skin on one side though the top was long and well tended. Both had that pillowy slab of middle showing all the way round. Nice kids; relaxed, out with their parents. And as I watched, one of the girls took an arm across her chest and held a shoulder, a gesture I had seen so many times on Fran, to hide herself, but also to soothe; I had borrowed the habit myself, for a time. At that Charlie must have felt my gaze, perhaps as threat, for he looked at me as surely as if I had called his name. He knew me straight away and started visibly and in that breath I felt it too, the jeopardy in our encounter.

  I turned back to the ice. I found Anja just as she fell; hugely, dramatically. Her legs scissored, one kicked up so hard and high that it pulled the other off the ice. She came down neatly, on the base of her spine. Elegant almost, ruler drawn. There was a jolt the length of her and then she lost her neatness and crumpled.

  A memory started. Me all of ten, pushing Charlie in his buggy. Stopping far too often to walk round and check him, fussing with his blankets, looking down into his empty face, dying for someone to see us. And there was Anja, and her fall, and the two conflated and I thought of the baby; of Anja’s baby.

  I was up, floored my chair and staggered, splay-footed, across the rink. I reached her and she was smiling, propped on her elbows as if she lay in bed.

  ‘Did you see that? Ouch! I’m gonna have bruises tomorrow!’ she said.

  I took her arm and pulled it, and she slid a little on her bottom and gave a silly giggle.

  ‘Come on, Anja. For heaven’s sake. Get up. Don’t get cold. What about the baby?’

  ‘Oh, I think it’s OK. At this early time. I’m not hurt,’ she said.

  ‘Are you sure? It’s not a good idea this. Come on now.’

  Her hands travelled to her belly and she stopped smiling. She twisted her legs to the side and tried to push up.

  ‘Do you think?’

  ‘Just get up, Anja. Get off the ice,’ I said.

  I bent and took an elbow and one hand, gentler now, though I didn’t feel it. I pulled her, and felt an answering tug at the base of my neck. She’d lost all knack for it. Together we lurched to the side.

  I glanced up to see Charlie gaping openly through the plastic of the marquee, hands flat against it, and his wife too. I tried to put my expression back in order, drop the anger out of it, and the shock. He looked slack-faced and stupid; unevolved. There was a quickness in my mother and her sisters, my best inheritance, but he was dull. Anja watched her feet and said nothing. She was sobbing by the time she grabbed the barrier, great fat tears that fell straight down on to her arms, my fingers, the ice.

  ‘Do you think I have hurt the baby? Oh my god. I did not think.’

  She was on the verge of panic and I was terrified she would fall again.

  ‘Silly girl. Calm down. Hold on,’ I said, and knelt to her foot.

  The lace was stiff; tubed and waxed and double-bowed, and each time I tried to work at the knot, a flake of my nail chipped off. Finally it was undone and I loosened the criss-cross the length of her boot and took the heel. She sat, face elsewhere, vague and compliant.

  ‘Help me out here, can’t you?’ I said, the knees of my jeans soaked and a horrible stretch across the shoulders of my coat.

  She wiggled and kicked and, between us, we pulled her foot free. It felt warm and damp and heavy in my hand. The carpet around us was drenched.

  ‘Come on,’ I said. ‘Don’t stand here. You can hop across to a dry bit. We’ll get there.’

  She put her arm across my shoulders and I slipped my own around her middle, for balance. She wore an anorak and a bobbly woollen jumper but her waist beneath felt thick, arced, muscled. A couple of clumsy steps and we made it to a seat.

  ‘Thanks, Maggie,’ she whispered, very close. Her breath felt warm in my ear and I smelt the mint of her gum; crunchy pellets that she chewed one after another until the whole pack was gone. She let me go, easing her toes carefully onto the ground.

  We travelled back apart, abashed, and said our goodbyes at the station.

  Back home, and the skin on my face felt raw, stripped by that wind I’d forgotten, racing up off the sea. I found some cream in the back of a cupboard, took the crust off with a tissue and rubbed it into my cheeks.

  I made a hot whisky with half a lemon squeezed in and a cord of honey dissolving at the bottom. A couple of pips floated on the surface and I breathed above it while it was still too hot to drink. I felt the steam kick in the back of my throat.

  I went, we went to Brighton. Simple, irrefutable, though from home, clear-eyed, the fact of it astounded me. An outing, an adventure, a day outside the norm. She wanted to go. I wanted to make her happy. For a time, it had seemed that simple.

  I pinched the web of empty skin between my finger and thumb. I could no longer trust myself, and I was all I had. How could I have passed outside the orbit of my own safe space and sensed no warning, no presage of danger? I felt bewitched.

  And yet. And yet. There was no one for Charlie to tell. No one who cared that I came back, asked why, or who I was with.

  Still I could not help but wonder what he knew, what he had been told, way back when. It must have had some punch; that much showed on his face. Someone leaves. They never come back. This takes explaining. Unless, of course, you are a family inured to your own disgrace, fleet and reactive. All that is required, in that case, is to look away. Leave things be. Nothing could be easier. A lie is only hard to sustain if it is bothered. My people have long known not to pry.

  My drink had heated me and, in a while, I felt numbed. The television began to grate and for a moment I thought that the picture and sound had slipped out of synch, but when I switched it off and on again, things remained the same. So I lowered the volume, and watched the phone instead.

  Later,
I thought I felt a change in the air, a tautening, like the pull on the string of an instrument, and imagined that it was sound racing towards me in great throbbing waves. I held my breath and waited, but there was only silence.

  21

  Anja changed things. I could not be alone in the same way. I missed her when she wasn’t there – that was the truth – and I was coming to be used to, to depend upon, companionship once more. It was wet outside, she was not due for hours, it all felt dull.

  It took me back to an older time, this restlessness, this constant motion. To Purley, where I lived with Chris, a funny place, near Croydon and desirable, I think, when we arrived. Road upon road of housing – villas, they called them – even the vet’s was in a house, and the cottage hospital where I gave birth.

  The first home I’d owned (joint), the first proper house I’d lived in (a roomy semi-detached), and everything chosen by me, from scratch, on a very fair budget. Yet it never felt other than impossibly strange. I didn’t know how to live in it and spent my days travelling room to room; indoor miles marked out by the holes my heels left in the carpet, hoovered up before Chris got back.

  It wasn’t the baby. Looking at her scorched me. She made me feel strong and brave, her and those speedy diet pills that I was taking – everybody was. It was just that the suburbs didn’t suit. Its bosomy embrace made me want to bite. Blame my mother. You can’t have it both ways.

  I lost the knack of female friendship about that time. The other women found me brittle, I found them dumb, their conversation narrow. Subsumed by motherhood but so unsure. I didn’t need to talk about my baby, I knew it all on instinct. I touched her and she burst my heart.

  Chris didn’t mind, he liked that I was apart, of finer stuff. I didn’t care much for housework so we were the first in our set to get help. Our set? Mostly airline – close to Gatwick – and couples on the up, transplanted from London, busy bringing their vowels into line and hiding unsuitable relatives. I didn’t cook, but Chris didn’t really eat. The funny hours he kept, and a dread of getting fat. We lived on biscuits and cheese.