She’s been living here two months now. It was the first flat the council offered her, and the man who showed her round asked her if she was sure she didn’t want to wait for something better to come up. No, she said, it was fine. She didn’t care where she lived as long as it was away from where she’d been. She would have gone anywhere. So she found herself here. In a high-rise, nine storeys above the ground. There’s a lift, but it’s usually broken, and she doesn’t like it anyway. It’s claustrophobic and airless, full of the breath and germs of everyone who’s been inside it. The stairs are just as bad, dark, smelling of urine. If you tripped and fell down the stairs you would die, and when June is on the stairs she thinks about this, and starts forgtetting how to walk at all. One day last week she’d stopped on the eighth landing, Billy in her arms, too frightened to go any further.
She turns on Sesame Street and sits Billy on her knee. They play a game where June pretends to disappear, dropping her face behind her hand and counting one, two, three. Billy looks at her with his big serious eyes, laughing hysterically when she pops her face up over her hands. She blows raspberries onto his stomach, and then gets out his books to read. He can’t talk yet, although she and Kenny used to try to decipher his gurgles, re-forming and shaping them into English. They were confident that he was going to be a genius. The book she’s reading him today is about a little girl walking down a street, naming all the objects she passes. June points to the pictures and reads out the words underneath – mummy, tree, cherry, dog – until she can no longer make sense of what she’s saying, pure meaningless sounds coming out of her mouth. Billy touches her lips with his fingers; he knows he’s losing her. Soon he gets sleepy, and she puts him back in his cot for a nap.
She worries that she’s becoming a capricious mother. Some days she’ll play with Billy for hours and hours, desperately using her energy to think up new games for him. It’s Billy who eventually crawls away to play by himself. Other days she can hardly be bothered to talk to him. This upsets her because, above all, she wants to be a good mum. She doesn’t want Billy to go through what she went through. The days when her mother would lie in bed, tears falling silently down her face. Once June wiped her cheeks and her mother had looked up at her blankly, as if she didn’t recognize her. Her Aunt Helen used to come over to clean the house and make dinner, wash her school uniform. She told June one night that her mother was ill, but that it didn’t mean she didn’t love her. The same night, getting out of bed for a glass of water, June overheard them talking in the kitchen.
‘You have options, Elizabeth,’ she heard Helen say. ‘I know you don’t think so, but you do.’
Her mother didn’t reply.
‘June could come and live with me,’ said her aunt.
‘I couldn’t do that,’ said her mum.
‘You could go into hospital, get some proper medical help. See a psychiatrist.’
‘I couldn’t do that.’
Her aunt went on and on, until at last June heard her say, ‘You don’t want to die. No one wants to die.’
When her mother didn’t respond, June froze. It felt as if the whole world had suddenly been stilled.
‘There,’ said Helen, ‘that’s lots of options. Let’s go through them again.’
And June had stood in the hall in her nightdress, her heart thumping, listening to them haggle over her mother’s life.
She goes back into the kitchen, at a loss what to do first. She starts running water for the dishes although when the basin’s full she turns off the tap and looks out of the window instead. She can see the Fancy Café, where she went once for a cup of tea, the waitresses cooing over Billy; and Corinne’s Hair, and Rajou’s with an iron grille over the cash desk. On the other side of the road is Pollokmews train station, looking surprisingly quaint and rural amidst all the graffiti and junk and concrete ugliness of the rest of the area. At first she thought it’d be good living somewhere where everything was so close together. It’d be easier, she’d thought, to manage herself here. But it’s not turned out that way: she’s spent more time looking out of the window than she’s spent outside. The things she sees from the window have taken on a nebulous, impalpable quality, as if they exist in a film or a dream. She finds herself concentrating on one thing at a time – a woman’s hands moving, her feet, her face – unable to merge the features together to make a whole living person.
Today she looks towards the train station, watches a bald man lurch like a sleepwalker down the platform. He’s got a plastic Somerfield bag round his arm; it swings as it blows in the wind. She turns to look at the clock and when she looks back, he’s falling backwards over the edge of the platform. It happens in a second, the movement as neat and final as a domino toppling over. She presses her face to the window but can only see the empty platform. It takes her a few seconds to move, running to Billy’s cot, pulling him up, Billy crying. Running to the door, her hands sweating, sweat all over her. Billy screaming in her arms. She’s not even out of the front door when she hears the train coming. Running back to the window, she sees it gather speed and roar past the station. Then everything’s exactly the same again. The sky arches on.
Inside the flat June screams, and the noise mixes with Billy wailing and a Tina Turner song someone’s playing at top volume in the flat below.
When Kenny arrives she’s sitting with Billy on her lap. He asks what’s happened, the door was standing open. He stops and looks at her.
‘What’s wrong?’ he says, coming close and directing her face towards him. ‘What’s happened?’
‘I can’t talk just now,’ she says.
He asks if it has anything to do with Billy, and she shakes her head. He sits beside her, taking Billy from her arms.
‘I think I’ll stay,’ he says.
When Billy goes back off to sleep, Kenny makes them a coffee. The room gets darker and darker but neither of them switches on the light.
‘June,’ he says.
She hears it faintly, as if it’s coming over great distances to reach her.
‘June.’
He kneels down in front of her, and puts his head on her lap, his arms tight around her legs.
‘I’m sorry,’ he says.
‘Please,’ she says, putting her hand on his head. ‘Shh.’
Reach
Rachel Seiffert
Rachel Seiffert (b. 1971) is a British novelist and short story writer. Her first novel, The Dark Room, was shortlisted for the 2001 Man Booker Prize, and won the LA Times Prize for First Fiction. Her collection of short stories, Field Study, received an award from International PEN in 2004 and her novel, Afterwards, was longlisted for the 2007 Orange Prize.
Wednesday, and Kim’s mother goes up to the school for parents’ evening.
– She’s doing badly, then.
– Well, no, not exactly. She can read and write. Quite well for a seven year old, as it happens.
Her daughter’s class teacher pushes Kim’s report around on the desk with her fingertips and Alice waits for her to pull the words together.
– She’s just not an easy child to reach, Mrs Bell.
—
Home is the end house of the terrace above the seafront. From her bedroom window, Kim can see over the rooftops to the old pier and, beyond it, the last curve of sand before the headland. Seagulls hover on thermals, suspended, and Kim watches them at the window, swaying, waiting. From here she will see her mother when she comes home from the school.
In the door and then chopping, no sitting down between and no hello either. But this is not unusual. Kim’s description of her mother in one of her schoolbooks: she always cooks with her coat on.
Kim waits after her mother has passed along the path beneath her windowsill to the back door and the kitchen. Face still pressed to the wall, and so still hidden from the street below, Kim listens a while to the pot and pan noises, then goes downstairs to find Alice. Early evening, getting dark, her mother is working by the blue light of the grill-flame, cho
ps spitting underneath. Kim stands in the doorway a minute or so, but Alice does not turn. An evening like any other: potato peelings on the counter, mother’s back at the sink. Kim wonders briefly if she got the day right, if Alice has been to the parents’ evening after all, but decides against mentioning it. Joins her brother in the sitting room instead, watches TV with Joseph until dinner.
If she’s staying, Alice will take her coat off and eat with her children. Tonight, she has a cup of tea and makes sure the washing-up is underway before she heads off out to work again. A reminder of bedtimes and a brisk kiss each on her way to the door. This too is normal, so Kim breathes a little easier, dries the plates slowly that Joseph washes fast. Watches the familiar sight of her mother’s back receding down the garden path. She can close her eyes and see Alice making her way down the hill to the seafront. Keys gripped in her right hand, left holding her collar together against the wind.
Kim’s eyes are sore tonight, scratchy, her lids heavy. She keeps them closed, keeps her mind’s eye on her mother a little longer. Imagines the sea flat behind Alice as she opens the salon door, surface skimmed into ripples by the wind. She knows her mother chose the shop for its view across the beach, along the seafront. Has heard her telling the customers, watched her polish the wide glass window clean of rain and salt. Alice plays no music in her salon, she does not talk much. There is calm when she cuts and sets hair. In the summer with the door open and the sea air. In the winter with the hum of the dryers and the wide window misted against the dark afternoons.
Kim opens her eyes again at the kitchen window, her mother long gone, brother back in front of the television. She dries her hands on the damp tea towel, flicks the last crumbs of dinner off the kitchen table. Kim tries to rest her forehead on the cool surface, but can’t; her neck stiff, resisting, caught somehow by her shoulders. The days before the parents’ evening have been edgy, and she can’t relax now, not sure what to do with all the worry.
—
When Alice is asked about her business, she says she makes a decent living for her family. Margins are tight with debts like hers, but she has no gaps in her appointment book to speak of, few concerns to raise with her accountant.
When Alice thinks about her daughter, as she does this evening, she sees her pale eyes and paler hair, the solid flesh of her face with its closed, impassive expression. Stubby thumbs sucked white and soft and drawn into tight, damp fists.
Alice has long fingers and strong nails; neat ovals without cuticles. She does them last thing before she leaves the salon, after the work is done. Alone with her thoughts and files. Rubbing the cream in, hand over hand over hand.
She didn’t argue with what the teacher said this afternoon. Not an easy child. Alice has heard those words before now: from different sources, in different disguises, so many times she has come to expect them. Would never say so, but she agrees.
With Joseph it was simple: love arrived with him. Fury when the midwife carried him away from her across the delivery room to be washed and weighed. Kim was early. Only a few weeks after Frank had gone. Gas and air, and Alice kept telling the midwife she wasn’t ready for the baby, but she came anyway. No tears and not much pain either. And then it took Alice years to get used to her: her rare smiles, her uncooperative arms and legs.
Alice hears the pigeons shuffling in the eaves above the doorway as she locks up. The soft, quivering noise they make in their throats. The water behind her is calm, just a slight breeze coming in across the sands. Breaking up the surface a little, touching her cheek as she turns the key in the lock and up the street towards home.
—
Thursday and Kim is ill.
She vomits once at school. A pile of sawdust and a smell in the corridor. Again when she gets home. Joseph heats the dinner Alice has left in the fridge for them, and when Kim throws up a third time, he phones the shop.
– Can you come home now, Mum?
– Run her a bath and put her to bed, love. Please. I’ll not be late. Make sure she drinks something.
Joseph does as he is told, and his sister is silent, compliant. When Alice comes home it is dark and Kim is running a fever: dry heat and then sudden sweats which glue her pale hair to her forehead.
Friday morning, Kim can’t stand up to walk to the toilet, and so when she needs to throw up again, her mother finds her crawling out into the bright hall.
– No school for you, then.
An unwieldy dead weight with limbs, Alice carries her daughter to the bathroom.
—
Cold black tea. Chalky taste of the aspirin mashed into jam and eaten with a teaspoon. Alice is home for fifteen minutes at lunchtime, keeps her coat on. Stands her daughter naked by the radiator, washes her down with a flannel and hot water in a red plastic bowl. Kneeling next to her clammy body, its awkward joints and dimples, soft belly. Kim’s eyes are half-closed and she sways as Alice works. Hot cloth on face and neck, round ears, down spine, between toes and fingers. Skin turning cool where the flannel has been.
Kim lies in new pyjamas when Alice leaves for work again. Under new sheets and tucked blankets, curtains drawn against the day. The slats of the bunk above her shift and birds’ eyes peep from the mattress. Beaks and wings. Kim calls for her mum, but she’s gone now, back down the road. The hairspray smell of Alice left with her, and Kim is alone with the birds again. They fly out from between the slats, grey wings beating the hot air against her cheeks.
—
Alice always hoped it would come. Read about it in the leaflets she got from the midwives and the library. You will not always bond with your baby immediately, but this is normal and no cause for worry.
Kim arrived and Alice had two to care for. Frank gone and only one of her didn’t seem nearly enough. Joseph was four then and she would pick him up from nursery school early. To feel his hand holding her skirt as they walked home along the seafront, to have his arms fold around her neck when she lifted him up.
Alice tried holding Kim after her evening bottle, after Joseph was asleep and they could have some quiet time together, like it said in the leaflets. But it was hard and sometimes it frightened her: sitting with her baby and still feeling so little.
—
Red-brown spots gather in the afternoon. On the soles of Kim’s feet, behind her ears, inside her eyelids. Joseph sees them when the doctor shines his torch in his sister’s dark bedroom. He pulls the girl’s eyelids down with his thumbs.
– I’ll need to use your telephone. Call an ambulance and your mother.
Joseph tells Kim later that they drove away with the siren on, but Kim remembers silence inside the ambulance. Looking at her mother and then following Alice’s gaze to the trees and lamp-posts passing. The strip of world visible through the slit of clear window above the milk-glass in the doors.
—
Alice Bell’s girl had meningitis and nearly died.
The customers in the salon ask concerned questions, and Alice gets a call from the health visitor, too. The woman has a good look at the clean hall, the tidy kitchen Alice leads her to. The grass in the garden is long, falls this way and that, but Alice is sure that everything else is in good order. Thinks she recognises the health visitor, too; that she has maybe cut her hair before.
Alice gets more leaflets from her. Is told about the tumbler test: roll a glass against the rash, she says. Alice thanks the woman, but thinks it’s not really any good to her, this information. It’s happened now, over, Kim will be home again soon.
The house is quiet after the health visitor leaves. Small. Alice sweeps her leaflets off the kitchen table, dumps them in the bin on the front on her way back to the salon.
—
Kim has scars. A tiny, round wound in the small of her back, where they tapped the fluid from her spine. And one on the back of her hand from the drip: skin and vein still slightly raised, puncture-mark already healing, fading with the black-turning-yellow bruise. She has fine, white scratch-lines on the soles of her feet, t
oo, but these are more memory than reality. Pin-tip traces to check for sensation, pricks in the tops of her toes that drew blood-drops, which later become blood-spots on the hospital sheets.
The real scar is at her throat. Tracheotomy. Kim can’t say the word, but this is where her fingers go at night in her hospital bed, and when she wakes. To feel the way the skin is pulled over, small folds overlapping and grown together. Like melted plastic, the beaker which fell in on itself when Joseph left it on the stove. At first the hairy ends of the stitches are there too. Six black bristles for Kim’s fingertips to brush against under the dressing, to investigate in the bathroom mirror when no one else is there to be looking. One hand on the wheely drip, the other pushing herself up on the sink, closer to the long, clean mirror and the grey-pink pucker of skin in her reflection.
—
Kim is back at home now, back at school. Weeks have passed already, but Alice still sees the first days in the hospital with her daughter. The pictures come at her from nowhere. When she is doing the books, while she is cutting, shopping, walking, on her way home.
From her bedroom window, Kim watches her mother in the dusk light, coming up the road. She walks with her coat unbuttoned and sometimes she stops, head down, hands deep in her pockets. Stays like that for a minute or two on the pavement before walking on.
The nurses held Kim’s body curled and still and Alice watched. Daughter’s spine turned towards her, small feet pulled up below her bum. Brown iodine swirled on to her skin, and then her toes splayed as the needle went in: five separate soft pads on each foot, reaching.
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