by Tessa Hadley
— What gallstones?
— Well, they may not be. I’ve got to go in on the fifteenth. Typical – that’s the day John wants the car to go and see his sister in Tamworth. I said to him, ‘You’ll have to fix another day.’ He says he doesn’t want to mess her around. Don’t get me wrong – I’ve got a lot of time for his sister.
Pam’s husband John was meant to do the books for the cleaning business, but as far as Shelley could see he sat in front of the telly and did nothing, while Pam went driving about all over the place like a mad thing – and the car was forever breaking down. John used to be a plasterer. He was supposed to have damaged his leg years ago, falling from a scaffold, but Shelley had seen him limp with a different leg on different days. Pam was a good worker, though. Once she got into a job, she stuck at it until the sweat was running off her, she wouldn’t give up. Shelley was like that too. They didn’t make a bad team.
They crossed the river. It was at low tide, sunk to a twisting channel between flanks of mud glinting with moonlight. A notice outside the red brick warehouse, which was not much more than a two-storey shed, warned that it was patrolled by security dogs, but there was no sign of them. Pam stopped in the empty car park, and they got out some of their kit from the boot; the employers were supposed to provide equipment, but sometimes they left out broken old mops or brooms so heavy you could hardly lift them.
Shelley switched her mobile off before she started working; otherwise, she couldn’t concentrate. Her son Anthony was in Afghanistan. Roy said that statistically Anthony would be in more danger if he were still playing with his rugby club, but Shelley was always waiting for some dreadful kind of message. There was a big operation under way. Anthony had told them that he’d had his leave cancelled, but Roy was sure he’d volunteered to stay. It wasn’t only that her son might be killed or injured – Shelley pushed those possibilities right down in her mind until they weren’t any more than shapes in the dark. She never watched the news; she only listened in from the kitchen while the others watched it. But when there was that fuss about the friendly-fire incident with the Danish soldiers, she fixated on the idea that Anthony had been involved in it, even though Roy insisted that he’d been nowhere near where it had happened. — Why d’you have to make up trouble, he said, — as if there wasn’t enough of the real thing?
Inside, the warehouse was a big open hall, divided into metal cages piled high with different grades of insulating material. Yellow forklifts were parked as if resting in the aisles between them. Fibrous orange dust was everywhere, but Shelley and Pam weren’t contracted to clean the warehouse itself – the men were supposed to do that. The canteen and toilets were along one wall, the offices upstairs on a sort of mezzanine. You could see why they needed the scrub-off: the regular cleaners hadn’t been doing much of a job. All the pipes in the canteen were thick with dust. Under the plate rack on the draining board and at the bottom of the plastic pot for the cutlery was a murky grey sludge. The toilets stank; the cleaners had actually mopped around a roll of toilet paper that had fallen on to the floor, not bothering to pick it up. One of the sinks was blocked and full of scummy water.
To be fair, Pam said, the boss had only been paying the regulars for two hours a day, which wasn’t enough: there was a kitchenette and a separate toilet upstairs with the offices, too. Two hours would be just enough time to wash the cups and plates and put them away, and give the toilets a quick once-over; to do the place properly you’d need four hours at least. Shelley knew what it was like if you had a job like this: you got your regular routine going, and then that was all you saw; you played your music and went into a kind of dream, wiping and sweeping, until you hardly knew what you were doing, just going through the motions. But she wasn’t the sort of person who took on this kind of work as a regular thing. She had a proper job at a school as a lunchtime supervisor. She wasn’t such a fool, either – she knew that somewhere like this, if they saw that you were keeping it clean in two hours they’d cut you down to an hour and a half. Why should you care whether the place was as filthy as hell?
By the time the men came in at eight, Shelley and Pam had finished the kitchen and Shelley had just got going on the toilets. One man barged in, despite the notice she’d put on the door, and then looked surprised to see her scrubbing on her knees with her backside in the air.
— What d’you need to go for already? she said, pulling out one earphone from her music player. — You only just got here!
He was sheepish. — Two cups of tea for breakfast. Bladder control’s not what it used to be.
— Use the one upstairs.
— Don’t tell me they piss the same stuff as we do?
— You’re not coming near my toilets until they’re spotless.
It was better when the men were in, there was always the opportunity for a bit of a joke. He probably liked the sight of my backside better than my face, she thought when she got up to refill her bucket and caught her reflection in the mirror above one of the sinks, a square of polished tin screwed on to the wall. Once upon a time, the idea of the man enjoying looking at her would have started something, one of those games, looking out for him among the others, bantering with him. She used to make herself dizzy, imagining other men, though it hadn’t gone further in reality, or not very often. She could remember once, not all that long ago, when she would have fallen to the bedroom floor if Roy hadn’t held her up while they were kissing – she’d been dragged down so powerfully by her own sensations. If it wasn’t the thought of Roy that had started her off that night, he hadn’t known it – he’d got lucky anyway. In the last year or so, those dizzy fantasies and their sensations had stopped, cut off as abruptly as if someone had pulled a switch, only the memory of them left like markers on the surface above deep water. She supposed that it was her time of life, though it felt more as if she were holding herself apart from her own body, afraid to leave off being vigilant for a moment.
There were worse things than going to fat like Pam, Shelley thought. In the mirror she looked sharp enough to cut something, hard fixed lines beside her mouth, her eyes too big, her cheekbones jutting like knuckles under her skin, up to her elbows in dirty work, cleaning toilets. The wall behind the urinals was tiled to about halfway up: at first it didn’t look too bad, and she thought she wouldn’t need to wash it all. But once she began to scrub, the contrast between the cleaned area and the rest was just too obvious; she saw that she’d have to go over the whole lot. She squatted to get at the run of tiles between the urinals and a little gutter along the floor. The caustic fumes caught in her throat, and she pressed her nose into the sleeve of her old tracksuit top. Pam meanwhile was covering the rooms upstairs. The office workers warmed up soup in the microwave, Pam reported, and left the dirty bowls out on the desks.
There were nine or ten men at work on the warehouse floor, mostly middle-aged, all wearing blue overalls with the company logo; the forklifts trundled up and down with armfuls of the insulation wadding packed in plastic wrap for dispatch, beeping when they reversed. The younger men listened to music through headphones as they worked, which was what Shelley did too. Her MP3 player had been a Christmas present from Kerry the year before. She’d wanted at the time to give it back; she’d never have an occasion to use it, she said, and Kerry shouldn’t have been spending her money on presents, anyway – she’d have enough to spend it on when the baby came.
— You’re such an ungrateful cow, Kerry had said cheerfully. — Just wait and see.
Roy hadn’t seemed to mind the sight of his seventeen-year-old daughter with her pregnant belly swollen out like a football. Like a bomb, Kerry put it.
— She was so clever at school. I wanted her to do something better, Shelley had said. — Not just what the rest of them around here do – shelling out more kids.
— Not so clever at biology, Roy said.
— I will do something better, Kerry reassured her. — Later.
— Don’t think you’re going to be leaving it
for me to look after. Just when I’ve got my own life back.
But the baby – Morgan – was so alert, twisting her head in her pushchair to follow where the conversation went, her eyes drinking everything in. She’d walked at only nine months, right from the kitchen into the living room the very first time; you had to watch her every moment.
When Shelley went for a fag break in the car park, she switched her phone back on for a few minutes. There was only a text from Roy, who drove a courier van – something stupid. He was always on the lookout for the funny names they gave to hairdressers’ and fishmongers’ and so on: A Cut Above, The Plaice to Go, that sort of thing. She supposed it passed the time.
— Anyway, I took my net curtains down, Pam said, when Shelley went through the side door into the canteen. Teabags were bobbing, leaking colour, in two mugs of milky water. — I don’t know when I’ll get them back up again.
— Why’s that then?
— Didn’t I tell you my washing machine’s bust? The whole kitchen was flooded. John sent me a picture of it on my mobile while I was at the back of the queue in the post office – it was the last day for mail-order returns. Now I’ve got this pair of trousers I can’t get into.
— I can’t believe he just sent you the picture.
— He claimed he didn’t know where I kept the mop.
Roy said that Pam had to be getting something out of her relationship with John or else she wouldn’t keep on with it. Is that how it is? Shelley wondered. What we get is what we really want?
Back in the toilets, she started on the sinks. The fibrous wadding the men worked with got everywhere; it had stained the enamel orange-pink. She had to use a toothbrush to scrub where it had mixed with green soap from the dispenser, then caked in mineral crusts around the base of the taps, around the plughole and the overflow. One of the young ones hurrying in the door, hanging on to himself through his overalls, stopped short at the sight of her; she told him to use a cubicle.
— Don’t go dripping on my floor, she said, — or there’ll be trouble. I know what boys are like.
When Anthony was a teenager he’d been as tense as a whiplash, swaggering around with his shirt half unbuttoned and his eyebrows pierced, stinking to heaven of Lynx aftershave, hanging out with all the worst types on the estate. Even when he was a tiny boy and really did look like an angel, he’d always given her trouble. She’d had to wrestle with him just to get his clothes on in the mornings, she’d been called in to school by his teacher time and again because he was fighting or disrespectful. But sometimes when Shelley dropped him off in the junior playground he’d put his finger on his cheek to show her the exact spot where he wanted her to kiss him goodbye – their little joke from when he was a baby. She and Roy had split up for a while when Anthony was eighteen months, and after they’d got back together she’d had Kerry. Anthony was the one who looked like Shelley, not how she looked now but how she used to: skinny and fair, with big hungry eyes. She hadn’t been able to believe it when he’d got into the Army. She couldn’t understand why they’d want a boy like him.
— They’ll soon have him sorted out, she said, but actually she’d been so angry that she couldn’t forgive him – or anyone else, either. She’d blamed Roy for reading war books and leaving them lying round the house. Or it was Anthony’s girlfriend’s fault: Leanne only wanted the money for those two kids who weren’t Anthony’s; she didn’t care what he had to do to get it.
— He’s going to make a proper career for himself, Roy said. — You ought to be proud of him, working so hard to pass his qualifications.
It wasn’t that she wasn’t proud of Anthony. The Army really had sorted him out: the first time he came home on leave he was tanned from training outdoors, his neck had thickened and his shoulders bulked out. He’d had his hair cropped short, and he seemed calmer and more deliberate. — I didn’t do too bad, he said, his glance slipping away from his mother towards the others. He’d never done a day’s hard work in his life, and now suddenly he seemed weighed down with sense and responsibility.
At first, whenever he was on leave he was keen to hang about with his old no-good friends, but eventually he lost interest in them. He said they were going nowhere, smoking themselves silly, which was just what Shelley had always told him. His officers thought he was dedicated, a good soldier.
Since Anthony had been posted to Afghanistan, Roy had gone on the Internet and found out everything about what was going on there. He followed it on the blogs and on YouTube. He talked about ‘the lines’ and ‘advance to contact’ and ‘hearts and minds’. Shelley thought this talk made Anthony uncomfortable, because it was impossible for him to share with them what really happened out there. He’d told them once about clearing out Taliban compounds after an attack and finding the bloody clothes they’d left behind when they retreated with their dead and wounded; it had occurred to Shelley that he must have seen much worse than bloody clothes, and then she guessed that he was describing the clothes because he couldn’t talk about the other things. Whenever they parted now, he kissed her as if he were putting her aside, kindly but firmly.
She felt around in the blocked sink with her rubber gloves, poking into the plughole with the toothbrush, pulling at the ends of the fibres caught in the trap, tugging and coaxing until she began to deliver up out of the drain a nasty mass, a thick rope of hair and soap and matted insulation, in a gulp of bad drain smell. Triumphant, she flopped it out on to the enamel, black-green and slimed. The foul water, released, went gurgling down the pipe, and at that moment Shelley was washed through with one of her hot flushes. She had to stop to tear her gloves off inside out, flap her T-shirt, lift her hair away from her blazing neck. She leaned forward over the sink, unexpectedly dizzy, taking her weight on her arms and staring down into the dark passage of the drain, understanding it for a few seconds as if it opened a way out of the world, or into it. Then, hearing the boy flush the toilet in the cubicle behind her, she scooped up the nasty mess with some paper towels and dropped it into the black bag she had with her for rubbish, so that he would not have to see it.
* * *
When the job was finished they packed away their gear; the car park was full now, but there was no one about outside. Pam struggled to start the car: she always gave it too much choke, Roy said. Shelley in the passenger seat turned on her mobile. There was a bad moment every time, while the logo appeared and the music chimed. She expected the worst then; she seemed to be staring out for it greedily, her heart straining.
— All right? Pam asked her.
The little car, after its hacking convulsions, rocked into silence, resigned.
— All right, Shelley said. — Nothing.
They sat there for a few minutes, too tired to move, giving the car time to recover, talking about their Christmas shopping: who they’d bought for, what they still had to get. More than half the short winter’s day had passed while they were in the warehouse. The sky was a blue so pale that it was almost no colour; wooded bluffs loomed above them, beyond the industrial estate, marking the edge of the city. The sun had dropped behind the bluffs already, so that the tops of the bare trees showed up finely spiky, like hair or fur, against a yellow glow of light from somewhere out of sight. While they waited, their breath began to fog up the car windows.
A Mouthful of Cut Glass
THE HOUSE WHERE Neil was born, in 1952, had been at the centre of Birmingham, in a Victorian slum that was knocked down a few years later. Nobody lived there now, there were only roads and office blocks, and the people who’d lived in the slums had been moved out to the new estates that ringed the city. Neil told Sheila that the house he was born in had had a crack in the outside wall that let the rain and wind through, so that for the years he lived there he and his sister had had to sleep in his mum and dad’s room, because they couldn’t use the bedroom upstairs. His sister had slept in a cot until she was six; he had slept in the bed with his parents. He told Sheila that the house had shared a yard at the back wi
th several other houses in the terrace; there were outside toilets and a brick wash-house with a coal-fired boiler and a mangle where the women did their laundry. The house had been condemned by the council the whole time he lived there, but the family had had to wait for the authorities to find them somewhere else to live.
At university in Bristol in 1972, Neil didn’t have to be ashamed of these things or hide them. Because of the politics of the time, the student politics especially, his origins were even glamorous. It was the children of bankers and managing directors who had to apologise for their upbringing, and practise roughening their too refined accents. Sheila had grown up with eight brothers and sisters in a vicarage in Suffolk; vicars’ daughters were in a category so impossibly quaint and comical that it hardly seemed worth despising.
Neil could have played on his working-class credentials much more than he did. Sheila had never heard him tell anyone else, for instance, about the crack in the wall. This reserve, like a strength withheld, was part of what made her love him quite desperately. He was very clever and he had absolute opinions; friends glanced quickly at him after they spoke, to see what he thought. Sheila had never expected to love someone who was two inches shorter than she was. It was a surprise to discover how her desire could attach itself to the aura of Neil’s power and not to the particulars of his face and body, which in her mental picture of him were always blurred. Although he wasn’t fat, he was rather soft and shapeless; his walk was shambling and he hid behind his long brown hair. When he pushed the hair back, his face was round, sweet like a girl’s. Yet just the thought of the quick, small, almost prim smile that flickered open in his expression when he was amused made Sheila sick with longing; it touched her more nakedly even than when he made love to her, because he did that with irony, holding himself back.
In the autumn of her second year, Neil took her home for a weekend to meet his family. He hadn’t been especially keen to do this. He’d warned her that she would be bored, that his parents would make a big fuss, but Sheila had wheedled at him until he gave way. His family didn’t have a telephone; he left a message with the neighbours. She braced herself then for something dark and raw, something that differed definitively from her own past. Whenever she remembered the vicarage she felt coilings of shame at the meanness of her life there. For all her family’s crowded closeness, neither her parents nor her siblings were any good at intimacy; they communicated in evasive codes, fumbling and deflecting contact. She prepared a perfect openness for her visit to Neil’s home, ready to offer up her real self at last. They caught a bus from the coach station out to Northfield and then walked up through the estate. Rows of low grey houses curved behind open grass spaces, their front doors all painted the same red. Children were playing in the streets. A man was cutting a hedge with shears in a front garden. The place wasn’t pretty, exactly, but it was neat and respectable. This took Sheila by surprise. She realised that although she knew that Neil’s family had moved out of the slums when he was a child, she had gone on imagining him pressed upon by frowning Victorian concentrations of population.