He was right to be fearful, I am hurting him. I don’t mean to. And when it’s this clear that I’m helpless, can’t stop myself doing damage: then I hurt him again.
He opens his mouth and I’m sure that he’s going to let loose this dreadful noise, a wail that will bring us both back to our senses, but he only mumbles, “Oh dear,” and steps forward, blinking intently at the floor. “That’s . . . that’s not good.” He crosses to the bedside cabinet and pauses, picks up the tumbler he must have left for me last night beside a plastic bottle of mineral water. I would like to reach and touch him and say thanks, but I do not and he fusses away to the centre of the room and softly kneels. “That’s . . . No wonder, Hannah. No wonder you didn’t sleep well.” He stands, still murmuring, walks out into the passage and away.
I cast about for the mineral water and drain the bottle, swallowing the taste of dying and bad responsibility. It takes concentration to sit up, to swing my feet down to the floor, to stand while the blood complains between my stomach and my head.
He’s left the tumbler upturned on the carpet, a splinter of light from the window, sparking against it aggressively. And there is a movement underneath, a darkness. Once I’ve eased myself closer, the motion solidifies into a scuttle of life—the fat body, the wave of legs, the scramble and fall of a spider trapped fast and fighting mechanically at the glass, wearing it down by atoms. It doesn’t stop.
Downstairs, I can find no one and it takes me an aching time to search, so I have to climb upstairs again, grimy with chemical sweat, and lie on the bathroom floor for a moment to try and take on its cold. Then I lift myself up, go out and walk past what used to be Simon’s room, then what used to be mine and then I fingertip open the final door.
My parents are inside it, on their bed, my mother sitting in her white lace nightdress, her prettiest one, and my father still in his dressing gown, lying curled with his back to the door, his head in her lap. She is resting her palms flat against him, earnest and still, as if she is wishing him stronger, or hoping to draw a poison out.
Only her eyes shift to me when I halt, already trespassing, and we don’t speak. It is clear in her face that she hasn’t slept, that I mustn’t disturb my father any more, that I should go away from their house and leave them be. I think that she will cry soon, but that she doesn’t want me here to see.
In one hand, my father is holding an old postcard. If he could, he would have come back to my room, slipped it in under the tumbler and then lifted the spider, taken it outside and let it go alive. He always tries to let things go alive.
V
Filth.
I need filth. That’s the only way to swing this, thinking of filth: nothing else is going to get me through.
Because sometimes there is nothing else: you have no resources and your personal situation is less than ideal, so what can you do but hope that somewhere low in your imagination there are images and fragments vile enough to simulate at least a gill of Scotch.
Church. Me in a church. What was I thinking? What could I ever have thought would excuse this? I do not go to church.
But here I am.
And my sole support for the rest of the service—forty-five minutes, two days, a week?—if it’s longer than half an hour, then it might as well be a week—the only thing scraping me through is the faint, but still repulsive, aftermath left by 200 millilitres of cough medicine.
Cough syrup, it’s a curse. Temptation may incline your heart towards it, I realise that: the warmth you know it lights, the way it lingers, that nursery type of numbness it lays down: but the stuff is appalling and does you no good. The flat, slope-shouldered bottles, they’re the worst—you can tell they’ll be snug in the pocket and hardly any weight and if you’re stuck in a certain mindset, the not-drinking-much-these-days mindset, then every brand of cough mixture becomes suddenly, tragically effortless to buy and guzzle down. You want it and then you want more of it and each purchase is a joy, because cough mixture isn’t a drink and if you’re not drinking a drink, then you can’t be drinking.
But don’t presume that you’ll escape unscathed—these aren’t the kind of liquids that will love you: Benylin, Veno’s, Covonia, Buttercup Syrup, or the weird, patent brands with Victorian labels and wicked ingredients, the ones that raise hopes of morphine and laudanum, the ones that you find in those furtively small, independent chemists—well, never mind what the brands are, none of them will even try to make you happy. In fact, many have been emasculated in an untrusting attempt to prevent misuse. Nevertheless, they will all of them give you a 5 a.m. headache that makes you quite certain you hanged yourself overnight, or that you should have.
And they glue the mouth. Waking with your tongue stuck to your teeth and your soft palate, your molars fused together, your gums and cheeks immovable, your lips fixed to your canines and each other—you won’t enjoy that. Levering yourself open with your fingers and anticipating blood, trying to decipher your condition while you blink into consciousness—and on one memorably sweaty occasion imagining that your whole mouth has magically ceased to exist—that’s no earthly use, not for anyone. That is much less than even you deserve. As are the hours of swilling and scrubbing and retching it will take to get you halfway sluiced and capable of talking.
And talking, that’s when you notice—after maybe one day of linctus your speaking voice can drop an octave, more. Try it and you’ll see. For a while, you’ll bounce back, your vocal cords will shake themselves free, or stretch, or else dilate—I’m unfamiliar with the mechanisms at work, but I know that you’ll probably sound like yourself within forty-eight hours. Only, if you keep on with the syrups, the linctuses and mixtures, then eventually you’ll end up just like me: singing alto if you’re lucky and willing to strain.
Which is exactly what I’m doing now.
“Yet with the woes of sin and strife
The world has suffered long
Beneath the angel str–”
And the rest.
My brother is standing beside me, hitting the same key that I am and chipping a glance across at me, now and then, because I am consequently inaudible. I am breathing correctly and framing up every word, but my growl has disappeared beneath his own. And I am also singing softly, because I’m ashamed of my throat—it is plainly a sign of a badly planned life.
Beside my brother is his wife. My brother has a well-planned life, including hobbies and a marital partner: one with blonde hair to the small of her back and an oblong mouth. My brother is a doctor, he has a career.
And a wife, really a wife. Simon has a wife. How did that happen?
Beside me and to my left is a stylish, young woman worshipper, perfectly soprano, who is shifting, almost shuddering, as I make my best attempt towards “its ancient splendours fling.” She has decided, I believe, that I am some sort of transvestite, unsuitable for public worship in a Catholic church. When we finally subside on to the pew, she makes very sure that our coats don’t brush.
You’re uncomfortable? What about me? You think I feel at home here? I’m woozy with Dr. Someone’s Expectorant Linctus and I haven’t been inside a church for decades. I’m not even Catholic, I’m just standing and sitting and kneeling when everyone else does, although—God knows, and I mean that literally—most of us here are tourists, we’ve come for the carols and are quietly wondering what we’ll do if they start to recite something Latin or dole out communion.
Me, I’d go and get that: I’ve never drunk wine someone’s blessed. And in hospitals I always say I’m Catholic in case I want to have the last rites. I do tend to believe that I’ll need them and communion would be a start.
Simon wanted me to come here, to the carol service. He invited me— this was his plan. He’d found out where I work, called up their number, and they’d passed him on to my mobile. Imagine my surprise, braving the fog and the black ice to be about CPG’s business and I’m yanked to a perilous halt by his voice, my brother’s voice. “Is that you? This is Simon. Is that you?
” I pulled up on a dirt track—both hands visibly shaking, who can say why?—and parked the company van beside a hedge. I could pick out every frozen cobweb in the leaves while he was speaking—you wouldn’t think a silk so fine could stand to carry a heavy frost, although I’ve heard it’s stronger than you’d guess, I think I read that somewhere.
Simon told me I should come and see him, and that he wanted to see me.
The drift from my exhaust like mist across the layers of hills and fields: all frozen to flat grey: everything grey except the white cobwebs, as if they’d been drawn, or scratched clear through to the faultless blank beneath a picture—Scene from a Selling Life.
As opposed to Scene from a Family Life.
But never mind pictures, it was truly the case that Simon wanted me to come and be with him. I hadn’t assumed that, or made it up.
And I couldn’t say no when he’d gone to such trouble in searching me out and the best choir for miles would be singing—who can resist a good choir?—and a bit of the festive spirit would do no harm and why hadn’t he heard from me?—well, I couldn’t completely make that clear—and, hardly surprising, he managed to nudge in a hint that my recent visit to Mother and Father had left its mark.
But Simon’s reason for calling, the big one, his great news, the thing he was desperate for me to know? She’s pregnant: the wife that I always forget about, she’s up the duff. My little brother is going to have a baby. Not sure what the sex is yet, it’s too early to say, and they think they’d rather not be told ahead of time: as long as it’s healthy, as long as nothing goes amiss, that’s what matters most. Here his words got cloudy and there was a fumble of noise and a break while the boy that I used to take care of let himself adjust again to his new and enormous happiness.
So I drove, as directed, to Glasgow, which is where Simon lives, and now I’m sitting in an afterglow of incense in the middle of a church, which is where God lives—right where He can see me, where He can lean in and have a long, hard look.
It’s ugly in here where I live, inside my skin, I don’t pretend it isn’t. But what else could it be? There’s nothing currently outside me, except a national celebration of being pregnant, the customary, mindless baby-delight: Laetare, laetare, Virgo parit filium and the manger and the swaddling and the cherries, the ships, the kings and the fucking star. Nothing but rejoicing, no attempt at balance, no touch of shade to break the endless light for those of us who’d like to rest our eyes. Why is it I’ve never sung a carol about the slaughtered innocents, the tots Herod put to the sword? I should imagine that there isn’t one, or by now I’d have found it and that simply isn’t fair.
Just like the fact that our theme for today will be unremitting joy and Mary expecting without sin and I must say that my brother’s wife is also quite the lady for keeping things clean—his whole relationship with her is stainless and solid and rich in openly shared moral certainties. They might as well both be virgins: they are inhumanly far from transgression.
Without her, he was different, relaxed.
Not any more, though, not since he’s been paired and silted up with ignorance and bliss—the two of them, they have no idea. They never will walk through their days, hemmed in with the scent of a child they haven’t got, won’t have, can’t have. Their lives are not conspiring to keep their son or their daughter permanently out of reach. They don’t feel it trot up and rest itself against them when they can’t bear to think of it. They don’t speak to it under their breath and tell it the things it ought to understand and point out sights of interest and little funny happenings, or explain the peculiar ways some people have of doing this and that. They don’t hold it growing and wasting in them like a frozen mist—the impossible baby, the one who would let them be tender. They aren’t afraid to name it, because of how sick and meaningless that will make it, will make them.
God can stare down at that for as long as He wants to. A bottle and a half of medicated blackcurrant and menthol and dying childless: that’s what I’m full of. He can dip in His finger and taste that at any time, I don’t mind. As I was in the beginning, I am now and shall be ever after and I didn’t intend me to be this way—He did.
“I’m His fault.”
The woman worshipper startles into turning and seeing my face, the state of it. There’s a wriggle of sympathy somewhere in the middle distance of her eyes and bless her for that—why not?—but I sink to my knees with the rest of the congregation before she is moved to make something come of it. My brother nudges me in the shoulder but I ignore him, forehead flattening my hands against the rail: skin wet, eyelids wet, and aiming my disarray tightly down towards the floor, tucking myself out of sight.
If God has to keep His eye on this, then I can’t stop Him, but nobody else has to watch.
Sometimes I believe in Hell on Earth, or that Hell is Earth, but then I’ll remember God: everywhere and endlessly, in each body and in each mind, He has to see everything. God the Only Child, the worrier, the One who frets over details and makes lists. They say Jesus had brothers and sisters—but not God, how could He? He’s always all alone with nothing but us.
Not that we’re aware of His distress. Or maybe it’s been here forever, before the stars and continents, and maybe we’d only notice if it stopped.
Or maybe that’s shite.
And, Jesus Christ, it’s “O Little Town of Bethlehem” next. That’ll either be up too high, or down too low—I’m not going to manage, wherever they pin the first note. And the incense is stinging my tongue.
I can’t resort to a further dash of linctus because my brother will notice and be upset, but I am becoming severely unsteady without it, especially at the thought of climbing back on to my feet. The dome is too far away above me, tensing and stretching against the uprush of faith, and the children in the choir are glistening with goodness and sucking in yards of air, then racing it out, much purer than before, and I am soaking with filthy syrup, although it’s not nearly as filthy as I know myself to be.
And that’s what I need to save me: filth.
Please, God, grant me filth.
Which leads to guilt, which leads to self-pitying affront and then to more guilt and the tang of hellfire, followed by a burst of undignified whining against the injustice of my lot and then round again and then again until I get too frightened and stop, but at least it creates some kind of energy, enough to rod up through my spine and clamp my knees to pre-empt buckling. And, should I choose to retrieve some specific misdemeanours, I can also enjoy the frisson of sin recalled in a sanctified space, the shiver I was already prone to during school services—although, as a child, I could have split my soul clear open like an apple and found it only minimally unclean, more of an overall creamy colour, an antiqued white instead of the full shine. Today, I can’t imagine what it’s like: as red as flesh, Jackson Pollocked with indiscretions, worn back to a dirty sliver like old soap. Still it’s mine, it’s never left me, never tried.
I have no child and no hobbies and no plans in any direction, I can’t even sing any more, but I can always rely on my soul, my record of sin. It’s my life’s work. I lie, blaspheme and covet, I keep Sundays busy and unholy, I quarrel with God and sometimes recourse to violence along with the pettier kinds of theft, I upset my parents and others I know less well, I’ve avoided murder—but not for the want of wanting—and I cannot commit adultery, having not married anyone, but I can assist, and as for the many other brands of fornication, well, sampling has taken place.
Fornication. That’s the balm to ease my eyes shut and let me hack right through the Little Town of Bethlehem, relying on remote control— after all, I have been singing it since I was six—while I remember watching Robert, myself and Robert: while I study the pulse and stubble at his throat.
No, before that. When I open my front door and he’s out in the close, leaning one hand on the institutionally yellow-painted wall. Mr. Gardener, live and in person.
I almost swing the whole view shut again and prete
nd I haven’t seen it, because this evening I am practically used to his absence, balanced after so many weeks, and he is the only person who can upset me. But then he smiles.
And this is his true smile, the deep one. This is innocence and apology, this is proof of some irremovable hurt, this is a need that he could die of and the knowledge that I am his cure, this is a nakedness that’s just for me, this is how well we know each other and what a terribly fast, raw path that makes for us beyond every defence. This is, I have to admit, why I can do nothing but let him in. “You took your time.”
The drinker’s smile, the key to every lock.
“I was in Canada.”
“For a fucking month?”
“No.” He steps over the threshold gently and blinks at me. “Only the ordinary type of month. I went out for a pint of milk and when I woke up . . .”
“You were in Canada.”
“Yes.” He says this in a quiet and still mystified way that makes me believe it may be true. “At first I was . . .”
“Not well?”
“Mm-hmm. And then I didn’t have the money to get back. My ticket ended up lost.” His face is thinner and wary.
“Well, I should have words with you, if I were you. Give yourself a good talking-to.”
“Don’t worry. I have.”
His jacket is new and seems too big: it’s the type of thick, red-and-black-checked lumberjack affair that I suppose you could buy anywhere, but it does look more Canadian than anything else. I can’t ask to inspect its label. I consider for an instant that it must be overly hot for the end of September. He smiles again as I frown at it, this time just a tired grin, maybe jet-lagged. “Bright, isn’t it?”
“Slightly. Do you have the matching snowshoes?”
“I didn’t think you’d want to see me.”
“Maybe I don’t. I just opened the door, I had no idea it was you.”
“I thought you’d recognise my knock.”
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