by Mark Morris
When it happened again, she said to him, “Do you think you should see a doctor?”
* * *
The doctor found nothing wrong. “He says I’m in good shape,” said Peter.
Ailsa washed the T-shirt. She spring-cleaned the flat, with the windows wide open, even though it was winter. When she found grimy streaks low down on walls that she knew she had cleaned, she supposed that they might just be scuff marks from Peter’s polished shoes. When she found the same marks down near the bottom of the baby’s bedroom door, she began to get up in the night whether or not she could hear Bella crying; a silence was more worrying. Every few hours she was out in the hallway, going into Bella’s room, turning on the overhead light to look for grubby prints on the bedding or on the babygro or on Panda, who had been Ailsa’s own favourite cuddly toy when she was small.
* * *
“I’ve been moving the furniture,” said Ailsa.
“I can see that,” said Peter. He stood in the doorway of the baby’s room, blocking the light from the hallway, the toes of his shoes on Bella’s carpet. “But—” He looked at the thigh-high wall of furniture that Ailsa had built around the cot, inside which the baby lay prone. “But whatever for?” said Peter. “Bella can’t even sit up yet, let alone climb out of her cot.”
“It’s not to keep Bella in,” said Ailsa.
“Then what?” said Peter, but Ailsa did not reply; she was busy lashing the piano stool to the fireguard. These were both things that were not supposed to have come with them to the flat: they had no fireplace here, and no space for the piano, and even if there had been space they would not have been able to get it up all the stairs. The piano had belonged to Ailsa’s mother, whose repertoire of fey little tunes had never seemed to make use of the lower notes. For equilibrium, Ailsa had made a point of only ever playing the lower notes, until her mother complained, after which Ailsa was forbidden to touch the piano at all. Nonetheless, the piano had come to her when her father went into the home, and then Peter had got rid of it because it would not fit into the flat.
When Peter had arrived home from the bank with the news that they would have to move out of their house and into this flat, the piano had been Ailsa’s first concern. She objected to its loss. She told him that when she was a child she had loved the piano; she had longed to touch its forbidden keys. Peter agreed that it was good for a child to learn a musical instrument, but said that Bella would just have to learn something smaller, like the flute. “It doesn’t really matter,” said Peter. “It just has to be something small.”
Peter stepped into the baby’s room now, coming closer to the wall that Ailsa had built around the cot. “How are we supposed to get to Bella?” he asked.
Ailsa straightened up. “I can climb over it,” she said. “I’m tall enough.”
* * *
Peter made an appointment at the surgery for Ailsa, and dropped her off on his way to work. When the mid-afternoon bus brought her back, she saw—as she made her way from the bus stop on the corner, with the baby in a sling—the furniture out on the street, and Peter opening the boot of his car. He picked up the piano stool and put it in. As Ailsa walked past him, he picked up the fireguard.
Still in her coat, still bearing the baby, she stood looking into Bella’s room. She went back out to where Peter was busy fitting everything into the back of his car. As he slammed the boot down, Ailsa said to him, “What have you done?”
“I’ve taken all that crap out of Bella’s room,” said Peter.
“I can see that,” said Ailsa. “But whatever for?”
“I’m taking it to the tip,” said Peter. He checked that the boot was secure and moved towards the front of the car. “What did the doctor say?” he asked.
“I need more fresh air and exercise,” said Ailsa. “And a hobby.”
“A hobby?” said Peter.
“A hobby,” said Ailsa. “You know, like drawing. I might find a class to go to, pick up the still life again. Or perhaps not still life. I’m tempted to experiment, to try for that texture again. That hair was so realistic.”
“Are you still going on about that bloody sketch?” said Peter.
Sketch. She disliked the word. Sketch, like scratch, like retch, like etch. Would you like to come and see my etchings? A man—a friend of her father’s—had actually said this to her once, a long time ago, and she had gone with him, this man she had known only slightly; she had actually gone with him to see his etchings, sketchings, scratchings, retchings, and she should not have done. Her father, when she got home, shaking and tearful, and told him, had looked at her, looked her up and down. “Well, what did you expect,” he said, “going home with him, and dressed like that?” And then, within the week, this friend of her father’s was at their door, coming into the kitchen and joining them at their table as if nothing had happened, as if his being there—at their kitchen table with his fingers on their crockery—were in no way extraordinary.
“Why don’t you decorate the baby’s bedroom?” suggested Peter. “It could do with brightening up. There’s plenty for you to do here. You don’t need to go out to a class. Find a hobby you can do at home.”
She had also liked reading, but since the baby had come along she had not so much as picked up a book, with the exception of baby books. Bella’s books had no words in them, just stark black-and-white patterns.
At some point during her mother’s illness, her father’s friend—whose name Ailsa could barely recall now, whose name she had no desire to bring to mind—came to live with them for a while. When he sat with the family in their living room, Ailsa made sure always to have a book in front of her, one that was many hundreds of pages thick, the thickness of a door, or a thousand pages thick, the thickness of a wall. She learnt how to be in his company for hours at a time, day after day, and hardly see him. But at the same time, he had learnt how to get around her, for example by challenging her to a game—he would go to the games cupboard and make a show of choosing something, and her father would insist that their guest be indulged. When Ailsa went up to bed and closed her door, she wedged a chair under the handle before turning out the light. One morning, she threw out his shoes. Now she saw that this had been topsy-turvy thinking, as if throwing out his shoes could make him leave. Anyway, by the end of the day, the shoes were back in their place on the shoe rack and nothing was said, and she began to wonder if she had really done it at all or only thought about it.
Peter got into the driver’s seat and slammed the door, and Ailsa stood and watched as he struggled with the engine. When he finally got it started, he pulled away angrily, leaving filthy exhaust fumes clouding the air. The car looked like a wreck but it could still get up speed on an open road, especially when Peter was cross and put his foot down too hard.
By the time he returned, Ailsa was sweeping the hallway with a dustpan and brush.
“What’s that?” asked Peter, pointing at the baby’s bedroom door.
“It’s a padlock,” said Ailsa.
Peter opened his mouth; he shook his head. He followed Ailsa into the kitchen, watched her as she emptied the dustpan into the bin beneath the sink and put the dustpan and brush away in the cupboard. She undid the locket around her neck, with her mother in one half and her father in the other, both of them in black and white; she threaded the padlock key onto the chain and returned the locket to its place around her neck.
“This has to stop,” said Peter.
“Yes,” said Ailsa, looking up at the ceiling, at the grubby marks around the light fitting.
* * *
When Ailsa had put the baby to bed and locked the bedroom door, she ran herself a bubble bath and then went to bed herself. She felt terribly tired and yet found it difficult to settle and slept lightly until she was woken by an eerie quiet.
She got out of bed and went into the hallway. At the baby’s door, she had to bend down so that the key on the chain around her neck could reach the lock. As she entered Bella’s room, she snapped on
the overhead light, so that nothing could hide in the dark; nothing, she thought, could sneak unseen beneath the furniture.
She approached the sleeping baby, and saw—in spite of the lock—filth on the bars of the cot. She carried the baby to the chair in the corner of the room and sat awake all night while Bella slept in her arms.
Peter found her there in the morning, with the bulb still burning. “What are you doing there?” he asked. “How long have you been sitting there? You look awful, Ailsa, absolutely awful.”
“This is your fault,” she whispered. The baby stirred on her chest. “He’s out and I can’t put him back—there’s nowhere for him to go back to.”
“What are you talking about?” asked Peter.
“The portfolio,” said Ailsa. “I needed that portfolio but you threw it out.”
“I haven’t got time for this,” said Peter. “I’ve got work.” He went into the kitchen and ate a bowl of cereal standing up in front of the fridge. It was still dark outside when he left. The door slammed behind him.
Every morning Peter drove north for twenty miles, and every evening he drove south again. Ailsa thought he drove too fast, always a little bit faster than the road allowed, overtaking everyone else as if he had more of a right to the road than they did. He would arrive home in a temper, fuming over some bad driver, some cyclist, always something, something that wasn’t his fault, fuming at Ailsa as if it were her fault, as if she had cut him up, as if she had overlooked his right of way.
Ailsa washed the dishes and wiped the table, scrubbing at a stubborn stain that had got into the grain of the wood. She looked for the place mats. Peter disliked them—he thought them feminine—but they protected the table. She found them in the pile in the hallway; and right at the bottom, in the middle, just where she imagined the hedgehogs used to hide in the bonfire, Ailsa found the grey ring binder that she had used for evening classes in the years between her father going into the home and the baby being born. She sat and leafed through it, singing a tune that she’d learnt to play on the piano a long time ago.
* * *
“It’s not too late,” said Ailsa. “We can explain to the people in the house that we want it back, that the flat is too small for us, that we miss our garden. We can’t possibly be happy here.”
Peter, taking off his shoes, said, “But we can’t afford the house any more.”
“There might be some money, though,” said Ailsa. “He might have left me something in his will.”
“And he might not have done,” said Peter. “There might have been nothing left to leave. The home might have sucked him dry.”
Ailsa looked at Bella playing with her toys in the narrow hallway. “But the flat is just too small,” she said, “for the two of us and a baby.”
“Bella hardly counts,” said Peter. “She’s only little.”
“For now,” said Ailsa. “But she’s going to grow. She’ll grow big. She’ll be a young woman with size six feet and a will of her own.”
Peter looked down at Bella. He said to her, “Is my baby going to have size six feet? Is she? Is she? I don’t think so! No, I don’t think so! Daddy loves her little feet! Little itsy bitsy feet! Yes, he does!”
* * *
“He keeps interfering with things,” said Ailsa.
“Who does?” asked Peter.
Ailsa did not know what to call him, and she’d rather avoid naming him anyway, for fear it would somehow make him more real. But he was real enough: he’d been tampering, so that things that had worked when they’d first moved in had become temperamental or had broken down altogether. First the boiler had gone, and then the television: while Peter was down at the pub, getting to know the locals, Ailsa sat down to watch something and the screen went black. He tampered with the electrics, so that sometimes the lights did not work and she had to make do with what little daylight came in through the mean windows. And she kept finding—down at knee-height and underneath things and in tight corners that she had to peer at with a torch—those sooty streaks, those grey-black smears. The thought got into her head that if those dirty marks appeared on Panda’s black limbs, she would not be able to see them. She put Panda into the wash, just to be sure that all the baby’s things were clean.
* * *
He was just concerned about her, he said; she could do with a little rest, a few days without Bella to take care of. His mum would have her for the weekend; it was all arranged. In the morning, she should pack a bag of baby things, and when he got back from work he would drive Bella over to his mother’s.
“But your mother’s flat is even smaller than this one,” said Ailsa. “She only has one bedroom.”
“Mum will manage just fine,” said Peter.
“But Bella needs more space,” said Ailsa.
“Perhaps,” said Peter, “while Bella’s at Mum’s, you could go and see the doctor again.”
* * *
At night, while Ailsa slept ever more lightly and woke ever more frequently, Peter slept soundly, unless his own snoring or struggling to breathe woke him up. Only Ailsa was ever up and about in the night, in the baby’s room, or sometimes out at the front of the flats, in between the flats and the road, looking at the moon or at a moonless sky, or at one of the very few people walking by, or at the cars that zipped past, and at their own car parked by the kerb. She stood there smoking the roll-ups that she was not supposed to have any more because of the baby, but which she liked because they cleared her head, they helped her to think.
She did not like to think of Bella going to Peter’s mother’s cramped and painfully quiet little flat. She did not want Peter taking Bella out in that crappy old car, driving so fast. With Bella here, in her own room, Ailsa could keep checking for smudgy marks on Bella’s clothes or on her bedding. She considered the car, thinking of the engine, the underside, the parts that were already grimy, oily; how would one ever notice some small smudgy fingerprints on a vital part, such as a brake cable? If something were to happen, it might be impossible to say exactly how it had occurred.
* * *
In the morning, at breakfast, Peter commented on the dark smudges under Ailsa’s eyes. “Did you sleep?” he asked.
“A bit,” said Ailsa. Although she had been up for most of the night, she had slept quite well in the final few hours.
Peter finished his cereal, put his bowl down near the sink and said, “I’ll be back after lunch to take Bella to Mum’s. Get her bag ready. Remember to put in her formula.”
Ailsa nodded. She listened to Peter closing the door behind him. She stood and went to the window and looked down at him getting into his car and driving away. She watched him accelerating into the gloom, heading for the bypass.
She did not hurry to pack up the baby’s things. Instead, while Bella sat in her high chair playing with her first solid food, Ailsa sat down and lit a roll-up. The charcoal-grey ring binder was still on the kitchen table. The pages of careful notes and neat diagrams from the car maintenance class were dirty at the edges. It could go out for the dustmen now.
When her roll-up had almost burnt down to her grubby fingertips, she used the smouldering end to light another one. She might have all day now to sit and think about what to do next.
PIGS DON’T SQUEAL IN TIGERTOWN
Bracken MacLeod
FRIDAY
The muzzle flash lit up Raymond’s mouth and nose like that jack-o’-lantern trick kids play with a lit match behind their teeth. Light spilled out from his lips and nostrils and it all seemed like a joke in the half second between him pulling the trigger and the top of his head spreading against the dusky wallpaper like a red fireworks fountain bought from a plywood shed on the roadside. Except, instead of sparks, his head showered blood and brains and bone around the room. Just like the Fourth of July, the air smelled of smoke and sulphur and the scents of bodies too long in the sun waiting for dusk to come.
The second before Raymond stuck the pistol in his mouth, he said, “Nature don’t give a shit ab
out fairness.” Immediately before that he’d said, “Fuck you and fuck the Dead Soldiers too.” Before Orrin had thought to warn Raymond about watching what he said, his heart skipped a beat and he’d told the man that if he didn’t want to have it shoved up his ass, he needed to put that gun away. And prior to that, he told Raymond that if he thought the motorcycle club was being unfair about his debt, he could take it up with the club president, Bunker. All those seconds in time, from Orrin banging on the door, to the creaking of his Chippewa boots on the steps, and the rumble of his 2,294cc engine at the end of the driveway to Tigertown were gone in silence, as though they never existed—just like the back of Raymond’s head and his memories and all of his dreams. And all that remained was the thrum of Orrin’s heart and the ring of his concussed eardrums.
Before he’d driven his Triumph under the WELCOME TO TIGERTOWN sign hanging from a gallows arm over the access road entrance, he’d read the hand-painted markers along the side of the state highway spaced out like old Burma Shave ads.
OTHER ZOO’S
YOU MIGHT OF PAST
BUT TIGERTOWN
IS WORTH IT!
THE MEMORIES WILL LAST!
½ MILE ON YOUR LEFT
Even though he’d seen them on his other visits to Raymond and his old lady, there was something about the visual rhythm of them passing by as he sped up the road, throbbing in his eyes like a dull strobe. They commanded his attention and he read each one of them every single time, as if the visit before and the one before that and the third and second and first didn’t matter. He needed reminding. Yes, this way to Tigertown. The memories will last.
Before he took the turn for Route 30, Orrin glanced at the plywood board affixed with rusted baling wire to the EXIT 42 marker that read:
TIGER TOWN NEXT EXIT—2MI. EAST
Before that were the entrance ramp and the city streets in Bannock Falls and the driveway of the Dead Soldiers MC clubhouse. Setting all these future memories in motion was President Bunker sitting on a barstool smoking an American Spirit unfiltered and saying, “You tell him, if he couldn’t afford the interest, he never shoulda taken out the loan.”