by Jo Baker
“So what’s the plan?” Mark said.
Sleep had crushed his hair on one side, pressed it upwards against his skull. He smiled, showing the lines around his slate-blue eyes. The T-shirt was loose and sagging at the throat, exposing an edge of collar bone, and honey-coloured skin. He’d had that T-shirt from before I’d known him. I remembered it when it was still day-wear; it was part of the happy acquisition of detail, part of coming to know the stuff that made up who he was. I remembered it from sex in the hallway, pulled up urgently so I could press myself against his skin.
“The plan?”
I reached over the side of the bed, put my coffee cup down on the floor; Cate clambered onto me, crushed my left breast with an elbow. I straightened up and shifted her to sit upright on my lap. Her toes looked cold. I cupped them in my hands to warm them.
“We should do something, go somewhere,” he said. “We don’t often get the chance, not as a family.”
“The Park,” Cate said grandly, and grinned up at me.
“There’s no park here, sweetheart.” My eyes unaccountably filled with tears. I ran my fingers up her ribs, digging gently, tickling. “No parks, just fields.”
“But there’s bound to be something,” Mark said.
Cate laughed at my touch. A big wet open-mouthed laugh. She wriggled and clamped her arms to her sides, but made no attempt to get away.
“Whatever you want to do,” I said. “We’ll do whatever you want to do.”
I stopped tickling her, ran my hands over her hair, brushing it off her face. Her curls were tangled, ratty at the ends; they’d never been cut. She leaned her head away, complained, climbed out of my arms and onto her daddy.
—
It was a cool grey day; no threat of rain or hint of sunshine. We drove to an open farm, about five miles from the village. Mark had spotted the brown tourist signs the previous night. We took his mother’s car. He drove and I looked out of the window. High hedges blurred inches from my face; a tattered white carrier bag whisked past; a sudden gateway gave onto a glimpse of green field, green-yellow moorland rising up towards the sky, scabs of exposed white stone. Then the blur of hedgerow again, a sliver hubcap, a crushed blue beer can.
The place was busy with parents and small children. They clotted at open barn doors, disappeared down alleyways and around the sides of buildings, lingered around the dog-pen, pressing up against the chicken wire to stare into the dark kennel at the back. There was a couple there with two young boys. The adults wore light Gore-Tex jackets and all-terrain walking shoes; the father carried a neat little rucksack. Their children, two solid boys in clean wellingtons and matching blue anoraks, peered solemnly into the darkness of the kennel. I held Cate on one hip, her skirt riding up, her little patent shoes dangling mud onto my jeans. Mark was in his suit jacket, talking about the Arctic Monkeys. My Converse were worn so thin that I could feel every pit and pebble, every ridge in the concrete. We are children, I thought; we will never be grown up.
Cate struggled; I let her down. She ran ahead, her little legs fat in their stripy tights, and we followed her. Mark caught my hand, and held it.
Piglets skittered through the yard like women in high heels. A horse leaned its head over a stable door and blew through its nose. I scooped Cate up to show her the horse’s silky muzzle, grasping her with one arm around her belly, the other under her bottom. The warm comforting smell of stables, of ammonia and horse. Mark leaned beside us, arms folded across his chest, watching us.
“They’ve got pony rides,” he said. “Shetland ponies.”
“If you fancy it, love,” I said, “you go right ahead.”
Mark laughed. There was just a glance, but I caught it, saw its appraising edge. I set Cate down on her feet again, and we followed her along the rippled concrete pathways between the barns and sheds. Huddles formed at doorways, broke apart, families moving off along their separate trajectories. We leaned on a barrier to watch the piglets suckle, the sows like great fleshy feeding stations, lying on their sides, motionless but for the roll of an eyeball, the flap of an ear. A box of yellow chicks basked under light bulbs. In a barn, lambs butted at their mothers’ udders, a calf stood uneasily on slender legs; the cow kept her head down, turned away. Blood and membrane and mucus hung from her back end. Cate pointed, frowned wisely, didn’t know what to say.
“Let’s see what else there is,” I suggested.
Back in the main yard, Cate tottered over to the kennels. The Gore-Tex family had gone. She hunkered down to peer in, her pinafore dress lifting up, her backside sticking out. We followed her, crouched at her side to look in through the wire mesh. In the darkness of the kennel, a collie lay on newspaper. Her belly was turned towards us; puppies squirmed over each other to get at her teats. The dog looked back at us, her eyes wide and wet with anxiety.
We bought Cate a Mini Milk in the café and coffee for ourselves. I forgot to get napkins; Mark went back for them, tucked one into Cate’s pinafore, mopped her chin with another. Afterwards, Mark swooped her out of the highchair, set her down on the floor, and hitched up her tights. They must have been sagging all morning, by now the crotch was down around her knees. He straightened up, didn’t look at me; I think he must have been waiting for me to do it.
—
Cate was sleeping in the next room. I sat on the floor, staring at the heap of my parents’ possessions, with an almost superstitious unwillingness to do anything, even to move. I could hear Mark downstairs, rattling around in the kitchen, opening and shutting drawers and cupboards, unable to find something. I felt a thin bright thread of resentment at his sending me up here. Dinner in half an hour, he’d said maybe fifteen minutes ago. I mustered the will to lean forward and drag a shoebox towards me. I lifted the lid and took out one of the paper-wrapped bundles. I peeled away the paper. The things inside were slim, heavy for their size; they clinked together. Underneath the newspaper there was dark blue tissue paper, still sealed with shop-counter Sellotape. I picked at it; the paper tore and I pulled the rest away. A pair of blue-and-white ceramic candlesticks. I turned them over; the green Oxfam label was still stuck to the base of one of them; I had an image of her in the High Street, cheeks flushed, swinging into the Oxfam shop with a bleep of the bell, to buy ethically sourced candlesticks for her country cottage. Such small domestic victories made her disproportionately happy. The next package I unwrapped was lighter, but in the same deep blue tissue paper. A pair of creamy beeswax candles; I raised them to my nose, but they’d lost their scent with time. I brought them and the candlesticks downstairs. I set them on the mantelpiece.
Mark had his back to me, grating Parmesan. He didn’t seem to notice, didn’t comment on the candles. We ate pasta and tomato sauce. That night we slept curled on our sides, our backs to each other.
—
Their bags were packed, the travel cot folded; it had all been transferred out to the car. I had my clothes and books to pack up. I had to bundle up the crockery, the china, start bringing whatever we were keeping down from the box room and out to the cars. Start slinging the rest into the bin.
“I’ll get Cate out from under your feet,” he said. “We’ll go up to the shop and buy a paper. Give you a chance for a last look around.”
He kissed me on the cheek, then he scooped her up, and they were gone.
I’d forgotten that there was a shop. I just stood in the living room, looking at the pewter jug of limp daffodils, the shiny patches on the sofa arms, the grey trails across the carpet, alert for a hint of static, but there was nothing. Birdsong. Cate’s high twittering voice as they walked away up the village street. Nothing more.
I brought down the brown suitcase and the shoebox. I put them in the boot of Mark’s car. I heaved the clothes out of the wardrobe and laid them on the bed. I threw the Radox and the soap into the bin. I sat down on the edge of the bath. I fished the soap out again, turned it over and over in my hands, looking at the crevasses and canyons, the grey streaks through the yellow, f
eeling the palm-smoothed shape. I set it back on the edge of the basin. I went downstairs and started on lunch.
They came back. Cate was all fresh air and smiles; Mark glanced around the room, taking it all in: the candlesticks, the jug, the nothing-very-much-achieved between his going and his coming back. He looked at me, an enquiring crease to his brows. I avoided it, focusing hard on making sandwiches.
Cate was pushing her toy car around on the living-room floor. It beeped and flashed as she scooted it across the carpet. She made a wet brumming sound with her lips. Suddenly the air was bubbling with electricity. My arms were rough with goose bumps.
“Don’t you feel that?” I asked Mark.
Mark was leaning thoughtfully against the breakfast bar; he watched me pluck the stalk from a tomato.
“What? Is it too noisy? Shall I get her a quieter toy?”
I shook my head. “It’s all right.”
“So,” he said carefully, “it’s not done, is it?”
I glanced up at him. I could feel the press of the tomato flesh between my fingers. It felt uneasy, faintly unclean.
“Not nearly,” he added.
“Mark—”
He shook his head and closed his eyes. He let a breath go.
“It’s not been easy,” I said.
“I don’t know why you even—no one asked you to.”
“Dad, though; he’s not great—”
“And you are?”
“It wouldn’t have done him any good.”
“But you’re in such robust psychological health.”
“That’s not fair.”
“We could have done this together, in a weekend. Left Cate with my mum. We could have paid someone.”
“Someone had to go through it all.”
“And it had to be you.”
“It had to be someone.”
“No,” he said, “it had to be you.”
There was a silence.
“Are you going to explain that?” I asked him.
“You’ve got this attitude; it’s like this past few years, for you, they’ve been an endurance test, and you’re having the most godawful time, but you won’t let yourself give up; you have to win, you have to get through. You won’t stop and you won’t ask for help. Fuck. You won’t let anyone help.”
Of course I couldn’t give up; how could I give up, what was the good in giving up?
“I’m coping,” I said.
Then he said, quite simply, “No, you’re not.”
The peeled man, his blue trace of arteries, his deep red veins, the grey maze of his brain. I shook my head. “I’m fine. I don’t need help. I just need to get this sorted.”
“Right,” Mark said, his tone ironically light. “I see. So. What happens now?”
I didn’t speak. My throat was too constricted.
“Nothing happens now?”
“I’ll stay,” I whispered.
“Stay?” he repeated, louder, an edge to his voice.
“Just another couple of days. That’s all it’ll take. Honest.”
His face was cold, closed. I didn’t blame him.
“We did say. At first. We did say a fortnight.”
He looked at me a moment longer, eyebrows raised, on the verge of speaking. Then he pushed himself upright, away from the breakfast bar. “Right. Okay. Fine.”
He crossed the room and lifted Cate. He held her with one arm, his hand gripping around a plump thigh. Her toy car was falling out of her hands. She wailed at the loss; Mark caught the toy one-handed and gave it back to her. He grabbed a bag with his free hand. My heart tugged towards them.
“Love—”
He turned around and looked at me. It must have been a long time since I said that word, in that way, if it could make him look at me like that. If I could have gone to him then, it might have been enough. But we were stalled there, too much space between us. His expression hardened and he shook his head. He left.
I felt sick. I walked along the grey track in the carpet to the front door. I went down the steps, and stood at the bottom; I watched Mark lean into the back of the car to strap Cate into her seat.
I came closer, looked in through the gap between the doorframe and the car.
“I’m sorry.”
He tugged at Cate’s straps. She craned her head around to look past him, to look at me. I smiled for her. He straightened up and went around to the driver’s door. I stuffed my hands into the back pockets of my jeans, and raised my eyebrows at him, trying to smile. He gave half a nod, a slight upward movement of the chin. He didn’t kiss me goodbye and I didn’t get to kiss Cate.
He slid into the car, slammed the door and started the engine. He swung the car around and burned off up the village street, leaving me with the smell of petrol fumes, a scattering of gravel, and a grey ache in my chest. The awfulness of it all.
IF EVE HAD FOUND the fruit not to her taste, and spat it out, it would still have been too late. Long before she realized her bodily self, her poor forked and vulnerable nakedness, and could not bear to feel like that alone; long before her teeth met in the dripping sweetness of the fruit, before she listened to the serpent Satan, before she opened her new eyes to blink at the sunlight and the man that she was made for, before the moment Adam’s rib was torn from his side and formed with God’s deft thumbprints, she was already hurtling to damnation; and us, all of us, falling along with her, as unstoppable as rain; because the crime is in the thought that comes before the act, the crime is in the need that comes before the thought, the crime is in the nature of the being and so must be in her maker, who creates her knowing she must fall, and damns her for being as he made her.
I could not help myself, no more than she. I was made like this.
The church bell was tolling for the morning service; its heavy impatient clang shuddered up the village street, swelling the house with hurry, vexing the spirit. Mam was hooked into her best dress, her bonnet on; she had John by the collar and was brushing at his hair. Dad was already in the street in his dark Sunday jacket, and Sally was halfway down the steps towards him; he swiped his arm through the air at her, hurrying her down. Hair combed and braided, dress neat, shawl pinned, bonnet on, I leaned against the windowsill, and kept quiet.
Mam released John; he bolted for the door. She set the brush down on the dresser, turned to speak to me, to gather me up into the general flurry and fluster. I let my eyelids sink. I frowned slightly, raised a hand to my brow.
“Oh Good Lord, no.” She hurried over, pressed a hand to my forehead. “What feels wrong?”
“My head.”
“Are you hot?”
“A little.”
“Do you feel sick?”
I nodded.
“Sit down.”
She fetched liquorice root from the pantry. I slipped it into the side of my mouth and crushed it between my back teeth. The sap oozed onto the side of my tongue, strong and numbing.
“Keep warm,” she said. “We’ll be back after communion. Will you be all right?”
I nodded feebly and swallowed liquorice juice. The church bell tolled. She strode over to the door, Sunday-skirts swishing, then glanced back at me. Her expression, so concerned and tender, made me blink guiltily. She smiled, making her cheeks plump up; she looked pretty. Usually we skim past each other, going from paid-work through housework to piecework, barely glancing at each other, our attention demanded by the boys, by Sally, by Dad’s needs, by meals and baking and laundry and cleaning up afterwards. I couldn’t remember the last time we’d looked each other in the eye, not for more than the briefest of moments; I couldn’t remember the last time we’d spoken of anything other than immediate concerns. I smiled back at her, the liquorice root a bulge of pulped fibres in my cheek. She closed the door behind them; I listened to their voices and footsteps retreat. Then I got up and spat the liquorice into the fire.
—
The room was full of sunlight, smelling of wood and ink. He had his pen in his hand, and the
red-bound ledger was splayed out in front of him on the desk; he was reading over something he had written, his brow furrowed with thought or poor eyesight. His waistcoat was unbuttoned. He wore no collar, even though it was a Sunday. I tapped gently on the doorjamb. He saw me.
“Come in,” he said, and started to button up his waistcoat. The church bell tolled. The air quivered with its sound. I came in.
“No church today?” he asked.
“I was hoping I might read.”
“Help yourself.”
He gestured towards the bookcase with an ink-stained hand, his attention already returning to his work. I went over to the shelves. I was looking for Robinson Crusoe, and at the same time I was thinking I shouldn’t waste my time on Robinson Crusoe, since there were so many others there to try, and time was short, and who knew when another chance would present itself again, and then the thought occurred to me for the first time, that he must know that I had been in his room, uninvited, and that I had read his Robinson Crusoe without permission. The titles and names blurred: I couldn’t distinguish the books beyond their bindings, the leather and board and cloth. In my mind I was playing out again the conversation of the other night, from his taking Pilgrim’s Progress, to our hands lying on the table a finger’s breadth apart, and him saying that I may come back when I could, and choose any book I wished. All that time, he had known what I had done.
His chair scraped back on the boards; he came over to join me at the bookcase, his shoulder just level with my cheek, his arm at my side. He reached out and rested his fingertips on the spine of a large blue book. His arm was dark, his sleeve rolled back. The bell tolled out again, fainter still.
“I don’t know what you’d like,” he said. I glanced at him, the underside of his jaw and a trace of the morning’s beard. “There’s Fielding, and Richardson,” he said. “Recently acquired, and maybe neither are strictly speaking Sunday reading. There’s Milton, and there’s Dante, which might be more appropriate. Homer; he was a pagan, but the translator is, as far as I know at least, a model Christian, and if your only chance to read is Sunday, then I’d say you should get what you can, while you can, and not worry too much about it.”