In My House

by Alex Hourston

  She shuffled in in her slippers that lived here and I thought perhaps she’d started to show until I saw the knot of towel at her chest. She wore the White Company robe that I’d bought her but pretended to find lying around and her hair was wrapped in a hand towel with the bits she had missed falling dark and clotted beside her face. All that bleached-out cotton made her skin a yellow grey. She looked bulky and uncomfortable. She hugged herself and I saw a ripped nail snag on a thick white thread.

  I went to her, touched an arm.

  ‘How about a drink? One won’t hurt.’

  She said OK, and sat at the counter. I poured her a large one and she held it like a bowl, inhaling it first. She took a long slow mouthful and I tasted it too, in my imagination; the pleasure of that first rare sip.

  ‘Do you want a look at the paper?’ I asked.

  I pulled a Standard from the pile, knee-high, stacked by the bin. She flipped the pages steadily, got to the end and began again.

  I mixed the sauce and pasta in the pan and lifted a heap into two shallow bowls. Grated a thick pile of parmesan onto each and handed her one, a fork stabbed in it. We ate side by side, inelegantly, bent over our food. When she stood there were slashes of red on the collar of her gown that I’d never get out. You could barely taste the fish.

  Eating seemed to have done for her. She took her bowl across and when she’d stood at the sink for a while, it became clear that she was crying.

  ‘Come on. Let’s go in,’ I said. ‘Shall we see what’s on the telly?’

  I unclawed her hands and she wandered away from me.

  When I went through, Anja sat on the floor, leant against the sofa.

  ‘Just chuck the dog off,’ I said, but she didn’t move.

  Their heads were close and, as I watched, he put his nose in her ear and she rubbed her face up and down his broad muzzle. He licked her, tears and snot, serious and careful, and she let him. Her turban slipped askew and her hair fell down.

  ‘Give me that,’ I said. ‘I’ll put it on a radiator.’

  She held it out to me feebly.

  ‘Maggie,’ she asked, ‘do you have a brush?’

  I did. I got it from its place in the kitchen drawer. She didn’t look my way when I came back in, her eyes set on some quiz show with a howling audience. It felt most sensible just to sit.

  I took my usual spot at the sofa’s near end, bottom deep in the sag of cushion, knees high. Buster raised his head at the disturbance, saw it was me, and lay down again, beginning an exaggerated stretch that ended when a pointed claw made contact with my thigh. He slept once more.

  Anja began to move. She pushed up on her hands and shifted herself the length of the sofa, face still tipped to the screen. She reached me – her shoulder touched my leg – and bent an arm behind her to release her hair, trapped between the cushion and her back. She stretched it out, set it gently on the chair by my side, where it rested, like beached seaweed, dampening the wool.

  ‘Maggie,’ she said, at the telly, ‘will you please brush my hair?’

  I started with the ends. I reached across myself and passed the brush through the hair that lay on the cushion, but the bristles snagged on the upholstery. I spread the limp strands across my palm, and began again but that did not work either; the strokes, this time, impeded by my flesh.

  I took the hair; gripped the bulk of it in a tight fist against her nape, a makeshift ponytail, and worked on that, but after a bit she shook her head gently – I let go – and took her fingers to her forehead. She scraped her nails quite hard across the dome of her head which I read as a rebuke of my own half-hearted effort.

  So I did it properly. I leant back and took hold of my leg under the knee. I pulled it in towards me, then across. My feet found the floor either side of her. I moved forward in my seat, took her head gently between two hands and said something along the lines of: ‘Right.’

  I started again at the base of her head, the brush flipped on its back, and worked where it all looked tangled in short actions until the teeth ran smooth. There was a patch of bald and I realised that this was what she did with busy fingers when she didn’t think I looked; bothered, twisted, yanked and then worried at the bare spot. I paused on it with the whisper of a touch, but she jumped, and I moved on.

  Next, I reached over the top and began a long strong motion all the way across the curve of her skull. My hand followed the passage of the brush and we fell into a rhythm, brush and stroke, brush and stroke.

  Each strand was thick, thanks, perhaps, to the dye, but there was not much of it. For the second after I brushed, the hair lay complete like a body of water, and then collapsed, strands toppling left and right, revealing her scalp to me in tiny white slices.

  Sometimes a noise burst free of the TV and I looked up, but the colour and the motion seemed too abstract and I went back to my task and the animal texture of the girl beneath my hand. She didn’t move; she didn’t speak.

  When I started on the side, I felt her effort against the brush, a resistance to keep her head from tipping, and so I held the other side steady, in my own scooped palm. Her head was weighted and unstable, though her neck, deeply furrowed, looked strong. She had a mole at the back that I was careful to avoid.

  ‘All done?’ I asked, but she shook her head, and I carried on.

  It is a mother’s job, to brush a girl’s hair. Mine did so, daily, but it was rushed and functional, brought to a close with the brutal twist of elastic, the aim to keep the hair out of trouble, nothing more. My mother brushed her own in a different way, and I liked to watch.

  Her hair had been long and dark, down past her shoulders, and she enjoyed the bite of the brush, I could see it. When she was done, it bushed around her narrow face like a capital A. I touched it once and it felt fibrous and connected, like candy floss, but she slapped at my hand and tutted at her reflection. She had a way of putting it up, a technique of twist and pin that tucked the whole thing back in on itself. At the end, she was left with just the shape of her head and a subtle thickness where the hair gave way to neck. The grips were perfectly invisible, and I never saw the whole dislodged.

  ‘Did your mother do this for you?’ I asked Anja, after a while.

  I felt a sensation in my palm; a heat, a glow.

  ‘Yes,’ Anja said.

  ‘And did you like it?’ I asked, hoping, I think, that she would say no.

  ‘Not one bit. She did it every morning. She counted the brushes. An old wives’ tale, no? It was boring.’

  She made her face heavy, new to me; a face designed for her mother.

  ‘But I like it today,’ she said.

  ‘What kind of woman was she? Is she?’ The hair was getting greasy now, overworked, but still I went on.

  She gave a big sigh that lifted her shoulders.

  ‘Tall, with a nice figure. Her hair is a natural red. We are not similar.’

  ‘And what was she like to know?’ I said.

  Anja had to think.

  ‘Kind. But always worried.’ A break. ‘I was not proud of her.’

  ‘Few daughters are,’ I said.

  The rim of an ear was lined with stubs of scar tissue – abandoned piercings. I thought of touching them, rubbing my thumb across the ridged surface. I wondered how that would feel.

  ‘I am ashamed of this now.’

  She pulled up her knees and wrapped her arms around her calves.

  ‘Your mother would not want that, I’m sure,’ I said, although I knew no such thing.

  On the television the audience roared. Buster whined in his dream.

  ‘But she was weak. I – despised her?’

  She mouthed the syllables carefully, twisted to me to confirm her choice of word. I gave a nod and felt a complicity.

  ‘Even as a girl,’ she said. ‘It was lonely.’

  ‘It’s always lonely.’

  ‘And soon I will have a child. I could not stand it if things were the same.’

  She pulled away and her hair sl
ipped out of my hand like something alive.

  What to say? I took my time.

  ‘Sometimes the space is too great. Perhaps it was that way for you and your parents. But it can change. You have the chance of a fresh start.’

  She said nothing, but looked at me with those depthless eyes.

  ‘I need a refill,’ I said. ‘Can I get you anything while I’m in there?’

  She said no.

  In the kitchen it was colder, and I was aware of my flush, the banging of my heart. I saw myself in the window above the sink.

  Back in, I sat at a remove.

  ‘Oh look. You like these, don’t you?’ I said, and groped for the remote control.

  A group of handsome boys danced in a line. We watched in silence and soon they were done. The dog stood, stretching out each leg until it trembled, and moved off to a cooler spot. Anja climbed up next to me, sitting on the bottom of her legs, as she did. She laid a hand on my knee.

  ‘What happened to you and Rose?’ she asked.

  ‘She. We drifted apart.’

  ‘It is hard for me to understand that. Knowing you.’

  I feigned interest at the screen.

  ‘There was an argument?’

  ‘No. No argument. She asked something of me that I couldn’t give.’

  ‘What could you not give your child, Maggie?’

  She started to cry in gulps and swallows. I felt her anger rise and the beginnings of a distance between us that I couldn’t bear.

  ‘Look, I’d made a promise. For good reasons. And the truth would only hurt her. It was complicated.’

  ‘It was about her father, wasn’t it, Maggie?’

  ‘Yes, Anja. It was about the father.’

  I looked down at her hand on my leg, white, well filled, young. Her nails were alternate pinks, a neon and a pastel, the remains of a home-made manicure. She wore a silver ring on her first finger.

  I took it, and the heat in it surprised me again, and the feeling of spongy give.

  ‘It doesn’t have to be that way for you. You’ll find the right words, Anja, you will. I didn’t. But you will.’

  I wanted to say: ‘Don’t think badly of me’, but I didn’t, thank god.

  ‘Will you brush my hair some more?’ she asked.

  I moved back towards her.

  27

  Let’s go back again. August 25th, 1984. Chris and I. The day he threw me out.

  A hot hot day. I had woken dry-mouthed and woozy; pretty standard for that time. Got up for the loo, tugged the end of the string by its knot, heard its neat perfect click. There were the flies – I will have mentioned those – teeming, seething. Just that year. They never came back.

  Then I was sick, in one conclusive heave, and that was not standard. My period was late, only a week, but I knew it for what it was. Pulled on a dress over last night’s sweat and strapped the baby into the car.

  We took the short drive into Croydon, a clear run with the radio on and the windows open. The breeze rushed in, pimpling my skin and raising the hairs on my arms and when we parked at the back of the shops and I climbed out into the sunshine, the morning’s heat pressed down on me. The road smelt gorgeous; it gave, a touch, under my sandals and for a second the horizon tilted. I was excited, against all logic. At having a secret, and the danger of it, but most, I think, at the promise of change. The surety that from now, at least, things would be different.

  I went to the boot for the buggy, eyes busy behind my sunglasses, my stomach empty, though I had no appetite. Trippy and insubstantial.

  And she felt it all; Bella, my firstborn. She always did; she was witchy that way. She reached for my hair as I bent for her strap and wound a long strand round one finger, laughing at me openly.

  My mood travelled through her, expanding into joy in her own tiny self. She sang ‘You are my sunshine’ at me, and I joined in too, stuffing my face under her chin at the sad bit. She screamed with happiness and yanked great handfuls of me as I pulled away.

  ‘Actually, big girl, maybe you should walk today.’

  ‘Yes. please,’ she said. ‘I am three.’

  Not a baby any more, as Chris was always telling me.

  ‘You infantilise her’ – a quote recognisably his mother’s.

  True, but just the way it was. Such were the parameters of our love.

  We took a lap of the shop to check for anyone we knew and bought a test from an approving pharmacist. I felt calmer on the way home and recited nursery rhymes to Bella all the way, patting at the stiff white paper bag on the passenger seat now and then, to feel for the box inside. I didn’t rush, enjoying the last few moments of before.

  I settled her with some toys and locked myself in the loo. I read the instructions carefully, despite having done this every month for the year it took with Bella. I had known to wait, and with a toilet in sight, was suddenly desperate.

  I rushed to undo the stiff plastic of the packaging. Unstoppered the test tube and clicked it into its stand. Readied the cup beneath me, and found I couldn’t go. I tried to concentrate, to isolate the muscles that needed to relax. My urine, when it came, was a sharp toxic yellow with a wisp of cloud twisting through it. I filled the pipette with a bubbly suck, and carried it over to the test tube, ready with its half-inch of chemical. I squirted in my sample, and watched the liquids mix.

  Bella banged on the door and I felt a blast of irritation. I said nothing and she quietened. A lorry passed outside and the shelf shivered in its fitting. I watched the finger of liquid ebb and ripple and steadied the tube with a finger. The instructions were clear. Keep the sample still. Any vibrations might affect the accuracy of your results. When the surface had flattened I left the bathroom and lay on my bed, summer coming in through the window, the radio down low while my daughter bounced and chattered. She knew this mood and liked it best, when I was still, so she could get to me. The fact that I was absent posed no problem; an advantage, even.

  I watched the clock empty-headed and when it was ten minutes over, got up to find a bright ring of colour suspended in the liquid like some crazy type of science.

  Then Chris’s car outside, back from golf, and I shoved all the bits back in their box, wrapped it in loo roll and ran downstairs, stuffing the bundle right down into the bin – not about to make that stupid mistake.

  I was washing my hands at the sink when he found me and I watched his mouth take shape in anticipation of speech when a dull thud sounded behind him, which was Bella’s head meeting the skirting board as she tipped heavily down the last of the stairs.

  He reached her inside the long pause of her inhale and I was about to call out when her cry finally came, though it was smothered by his shirt. A great big bump appeared and then a lollipop, which he had bought on the way home, held back until the medicine went down. No harm done.

  A better father than he was a husband. I wondered if it was me.

  I went back to the day. It was mainly preparations for that evening, the dinner Chris had arranged on our behalf, but my piano lesson first.

  I ran through my practice before he arrived, like a schoolgirl, and drank up my praise when it came. The room was stifling, the crispy old velvet of the piano stool sticking to my cotton dress.

  I felt sorry for Ben, sopping in his shirt, which he plucked away from him in a nervous gesture. A half-circle of sweat showed through in the space above his vest, and his hair at the back was darkened, like Bella’s after a nightmare. I had imagined him an émigré, a Jew with a tragic story, but he was a local boy, from Carshalton. I played ‘Ave Maria’, still new, before I’d heard it on a hundred TV weddings, and a miracle to me. It brought Chris to the door but Ben hadn’t noticed, listening with his eyes shut, and he jumped when Chris spoke: ‘That’s beautiful, Maggie. You’re really coming along.’

  Afterwards, I offered Ben lemonade; fresh lemons in a tall glass jug stirred with a long metal spoon. We talked, sometimes, while we shared a drink but Chris joined us today and conversation limped.


  And all the time there was the baby, my knowledge of it. I nearly told Ben, after the piece, but common sense prevailed. I bent to it now and again and warmed my hands there for a while, and then turned back to the world, bland and smiling, before anyone noticed that I’d gone.

  It receded, though, during the party. I was distracted, hot and tipsy, trying to keep to the timings and make it all look effortless. Until Jan, until the very end of the night. I was exhausted, no longer vigilant, the smell of her menthol fag brought my hand to my mouth and she said: ‘Maggie, are you all right? Are you sick?’ Then: ‘You’re not.’

  We were sat out the back on the wooden kitchen chairs, just her and me, the others behind us, indoors. I dropped my head, legs wide, the top of my arms along my thighs. All around was the sound of scores of couples enjoying identical evenings.

  The noise of it rushed me and I thought that I would vomit, but it passed and things returned to their appropriate distance. I glanced at her briefly. Down again. Rubbed my eyes and my temples.

  ‘I see,’ she said.

  A little time and I straightened. I looked out into the dark of the garden, the air hot and solid, and saw a lit square of orange appear in the night. Someone sat, on the loo, I imagined, and I watched them, framed by the window in perfect profile like a face on a cameo. A matter of seconds and they stood and the night was sealed shut again. I turned to Jan, feeling like I’d imagined it.

  She sat posed, stiff and awkward, and I thought maybe she was ill – something to do with my food – and then realised.

  ‘Oh, Jan, I’m so sorry. I know you and Ian. Have had problems. I mean. That you’ve been trying for a while.’

  She gave no acknowledgement.

  ‘I should’ve. Sorry. It was thoughtless.’

  ‘It’s all right, Maggie,’ she said, and got up from her chair.

  She walked back inside and I thought how little I liked this woman and wondered why I had spent an evening trying to please her. Then I remembered that I hadn’t, that I had made fun of her jelly, and snorted a giggle out of my nose. I sneaked up the stairs to my daughter.