by Sarah Moss
I sat down and arranged Moth on my lap, floppy as a doll. He opened his eyes and looked at Zoe as if she had just landed from Pluto.
‘Yes, please. If you don’t mind. And could you put the oven on? About two hundred?’
Zoe peeled Canterbury Cathedral off the dough and began to knead. I hoped her hands were clean.
‘You’ll need extra flour. Bottom cupboard.’
Moth took my hand and sucked my knuckle as if it were full of milk.
‘Moth love. Do you want a drink?’
He rubbed his face against my jumper and I hugged him. He won’t always want to sit in my lap. I kissed his hair, and looked up to see Zoe watching us.
‘It’s so sweet. I know my mum never did that.’
‘Zoe, I’m sure she did. All mothers do this. It’s not even about love, it’s not as complicated or demanding as love, it’s just animal physicality.’
She sprinkled flour on to the dough. ‘All my mother’s animal physicality is directed towards food. And drink. You know that ice cream I bought? For the children? Well, the next day when I went to look it was gone. She hadn’t even recycled the pot, it was in the bin. I suppose she thought I wouldn’t look there. There’s about three thousand calories in a litre of that stuff.’
I sipped tea and felt tired. Moth wriggled on my lap. ‘Moth do kneading?’
‘Can you give him a bit, Zoe? Just a small handful.’
Moth slid down and wobbled over to her, and then sat on the floor and pressed his dough.
‘Don’t worry, we won’t eat that bit.’ I watched her hands moving like crabs in the dough. ‘Zoe, are things OK? Over at Black Rock?’
I would never have gone on holiday with my parents at eighteen. Nor would they have invited me. I could see the muscles in Zoe’s arms moving like ropes between bone and skin. She tossed her hair. Another health and safety issue in re bread.
‘No. But they made me come. Now she keeps saying I ought to be grateful when she’s spent all that money bringing me here. They were paying for the cottage anyway, and it’s not as if my presence in the car is going to add much to the petrol consumption. Not with her up front.’
I had a vision of the three of them on the motorway, Brian driving, Judith issuing a running deprecation of the landscape, other drivers, the lack of foresight shown by those using service stations and not bringing their own sandwiches, the weather, and anything else that came to mind, as if with enough superiority she could earn her daughter’s health. And Zoe getting obstinately thinner in the back and an empty space where Will used to be. It’s a long way from Manchester to Colla.
Moth threw his dough at floor. ‘Splat! Squash a dough!’
‘Yes, but don’t stand on it, please. Look, knead it like Zoe.’
‘Splat!’
I stood up. ‘Sit down and have some tea. I’ll do this. You don’t honestly look up to the work anyway.’
She looked away. ‘I’m fine. I went running this morning. It’s Mum who’s not fit.’
‘Well, I shouldn’t think that makes her happy.’ I floured the bowl and began to knead. ‘So do you have plans for the next year? Or are you going to see if you can go to Cambridge in October? If someone’s missed their grades they might have a place for you.’
She ran her finger round the top of the mug. ‘If I decide to go at all.’
‘Old MacDonald!’ said Moth. ‘Old MacDonald had a dragon!’
‘You might as well try it,’ I said. ‘You can always leave.’ I could hear the law tutors at Trinity cursing me. ‘Surely you’d be better there than at home. Are you looking forward to the work? Old MacDonald had a farm, ee-i, ee-i, o. And on that farm he had a dragon, ee-i, ee-i, o.’
‘Yes. I’m not doing it for the reasons you think.’
‘More dragon!’
‘With a puff, puff here and a puff, puff there, here a puff, there a puff, everywhere a puff, puff. What do I think?’
‘I’m doing law because I want to join the Establishment and make lots of money.’
‘Old MacDonald had a leopard.’
‘Old MacDonald had a farm, ee-i, ee-i, o. Not at all. You might want to work in a women’s refuge or with socially disadvantaged children. I imagine that would annoy your mother. And on that farm he had a leopard, ee-i, ee-i, o.’
‘I just like the idea. It’s a matrix that makes sense of what people do. I mean, you can be driving along listening to whatever and thinking about whether to buy a pair of shoes and if you’re doing it at twenty-nine miles an hour you’re innocent and if you’re doing it at thirty-six miles an hour you’re guilty. It’s like, we make it sound objective but it’s all about telling stories. Pushing people under trains is illegal but if they were trying to knife you at the time it’s probably OK. Eating bananas is totally fine unless you haven’t paid for them. But it looks exactly the same at the time whether you’re becoming a criminal or not. I like the way law makes sense out of the way people behave. It’s kind of reassuring, I suppose. Like there’s something consistent.’
‘Leopards say roar! Leopards on a farm!’
‘With a roar, roar here, and a roar, roar there. Ee-i, ee-i, o.’ Killing babies is wrong but if it is your own baby you may be mad, which is not a criminal offence. Zoe passed me the bowl and I pulled the dough apart into three more or less equal pieces. ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I see the appeal of that. History is also about narrative, in the end. Whether the gaps and silences might mean anything. Though the consequences of the stories you tell are much more general. Cultural memory and national identity rather than who goes to prison. And you don’t get to think about individuals in quite the same way.’
‘Wolf on a bus.’ Moth held up his dough, grey now and with a small feather partially embedded in it. ‘Moth made bread.’
‘Thank you, Moth.’
‘Wolf on a bus!’
‘The wolf on the bus goes munch munch munch, munch munch munch, munch munch munch. The wolf on the bus goes munch munch munch, all day long.’ I drank some more tea. ‘Not that he’s seen a bus in months.’
‘People do go to prison because of cultural memory and national identity,’ said Zoe. ‘Most kinds of terrorism are kind of about cultural memory, aren’t they? Righting the wrongs of history? It’s all, like, story-telling in the end.’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘You know, Zoe, you’d be good in a tutorial.’
‘Do you miss Oxford?’ she asked.
I floured the loaf tins.
‘Less than I did,’ I said. ‘Less than I did.’
I put the loaves in their tins and set them to rise again.
‘Moth, shall we bake your bread?’
He looked appalled, as if I’d suggested wiping his nose or combing his hair.
‘No. Moth looking after bread.’
He carried it off to the playroom, cupped in his hands like a baby bird or an insect, glancing back over his shoulder in wonder at my barbaric ideas.
‘Come on, Moth’s bread. We play with a animals in a par cark.’
Maybe Raph brings on the apocalypse and Moth plays at the nuclear winter that follows, where animals browse car parks and make nests in office buildings cracked open like Easter eggs.
I filled the mixing bowl with hot water. Zoe was picking at the skin around her nails.
‘So what happened in Canada? You were on a conservation project?’
She glanced out of the window, where heavy clouds were congregating in the north. Giles and Raph should be safe in Colla, cocooned in the warmth of the library or absorbing the smell of chips and beer in the pub. The washing up seemed to have proliferated inexplicably, as it does when people won’t reuse plates from which it is easy to shake a few crumbs. I poured Zoe some more tea.
‘At first it was great. There were six of us. Volunteers. The others were all Canadian. And there was Bill. Bill runs the place. We slept in this wooden hut with a veranda and you could just step out into the forest in the morning. The trees were like taller than I’ve ever seen, ta
ller than this house, and it’s like being in a greenhouse. This ceiling of pine branches, and underneath a huge space for growing. And we could hear the sea in the night. It felt so totally far from home. It was so cool, thinking about the world and my parents right round on the other side of it. I’d never seen the Pacific before. I mean, you think it’s all just sea but it was different, all the shells and things were different. Everything smelt of trees and rain. And one of the guys – Hayden – we got together. And I really liked him.’
She ran her finger round the inside of her mug’s handle. From the playroom, I heard Moth singing ‘Pop Goes the Weasel’.
‘It sounds lovely.’ I began to scrub the flour that had dried on to the mixing bowl. Gap years were still a minority pursuit when I was eighteen, Grand Tours for the rich and indecisive. Giles had one. I went to skivvy in France and told my mother it was to save some money for university.
‘And then I met this woman one day. I was out for a walk on my own and I was like a bit worried about bears. They have these signs telling you what to do if you meet one but it’s really obvious that the things they tell you are just ways of amusing yourself until the bear eats you. You know, make lots of noise, stay in groups. The bit I liked said, “Exercise extra caution walking into the wind or near water,” but it didn’t say how. And then if you do meet one you’re supposed to back away slowly and talk to it in soothing tones. Can you imagine? Don’t worry, bear, I’m on my way. Don’t eat me. And if that doesn’t work, you use your backpack to protect your head. I mean, wouldn’t you rather it ate your head first? And if you’ve still got your head on you can try climbing trees, except that black bears are better at climbing trees than people are, and then if you end up in a tree with a bear you’re meant to try to like intimidate it. It’s not really advice so much as a manual for a messy death.’
Moth put his head around the door. ‘Mummy laughing,’ he remarked, disapproving as if Mummy were throwing her bra at the stage.
‘Anyway, so I didn’t want to be scared by these ridiculous signs but I also didn’t want to turn into bear lunch before I’d even got to Cambridge, and there was no one around so I was sort of walking along singing. The signs tell you to make a noise. Jerusalem the Golden, actually. I went to that kind of school. And I met this woman so I was embarrassed and she thought it was totally funny and we got talking. And it turned out she was running a campaign group against logging and fish farming. And that was when I realized.’
She pushed her hair back. There were tears in her eyes and her voice was harsh.
‘None of it’s real, Anna. There’s almost no virgin forest left. It’s all been like logged and they’ve let some of it grow back because in the pretty bits by the sea they can make more money out of tourism than logging. In the middle of the island where tourists don’t go, there are hundreds of miles where it looks like a nuclear bomb fell. They’ve just totally obliterated it. All those centuries of slow growth. They just take these horrible diggers that’re designed to go up almost any mountain and they raze the rainforest. All of it. And the blue inlets I liked are full of fish farms, which fill the water with antibiotics and pesticides and poison everything else, and the fish farmers kill all the seals and bears they can get their hands on to stop them eating the farmed fish.’
She put her hands over her face.
‘They don’t even always shoot them. There were some baby bears – I don’t want to think about it. I mean, I know it’s kind of sentimental to get upset about baby bears because they’re totally cute but it’s not just that, it’s the mountains and the sea. I mean, I went to this place because I thought it was the real thing, you know, one of those rare bits of the planet we haven’t utterly fucked up, and I was wrong. It’s fucked up but we’re so totally good at fucking up the planet now that we can do that and still make money out of morons like me who think the cultivated bits round the edges are the real thing. And it’s too late now. My parents’ generation have totally screwed the entire planet beyond any possibility of redemption and when they’ve finished spending their retirements buying like new teak garden furniture and flying to New Zealand because sixty is the new thirty and they can still go bungee jumping they’re going to die and leave the rest of us to kill each other for water and oil. I mean, Jesus, Anna, how could you have kids when there’s nothing left for them because my mother’s eaten it all?’
I rinsed the bowl and rebuilt the pile of wet dishes on the draining board to accommodate it. You wouldn’t want to eat off anything that had been dried on our tea-towels.
‘We worried,’ I said. ‘People have always worried that it’s a stupid time to have children, even in the eighteenth century. And the seventeenth. That’s where the hostages to fortune quote comes from, Bacon. We wanted them. That’s the only good reason for having babies. They’re people who are wanted. At least at the beginning. And you never know, they might change the world.’
She pushed her hair back. ‘They might have to.’
‘Well,’ I said. ‘If they have to, they probably will. People usually do what they have to do. I mean, Raph’s working on it already. And it sounds to me as if you’ve got some excellent reasons there for being the best lawyer you possibly can be. Go to Cambridge and specialize in environmental legislation or work for Greenpeace or something.’
‘It’s too late,’ she said. ‘Don’t you understand? There’s nothing left to save.’
I watched the water pooling along the tidemark on the draining board. The bottom of the tap was encrusted with something brown. The problem with the logic of despair is that it is right, only not useful.
‘There are six billion people, or whatever it is. And you’ll need to do something with your life. You can’t help consuming, so you might as well produce something useful. You’re here now.’
I sounded like a Girl Guide leader. I looked at the ribs poking through her sweater. There are, of course, ways of not consuming, though I’m sure full blown anorexia must in the end have a higher carbon footprint than Giles’s kind of eating. All those plastic tubes, for one thing. But the moral argument for consuming less is from any point of view incontrovertible, and I do not know that I can argue that there is still time to save the world.
Rain spattered the window. Those clouds had taken over the sky. ‘Remember telling your mother she’s not a superior being? Well, you’re not either. You’ve got a body and a mind just like everyone else. There are no career opportunities in being an anchorite these days.’
She looked at me. ‘I’m not like my mother. She thinks she’s better than everyone else. She thinks Judith Fairchild is like the measure of humanity and everyone else falls short.’
‘Well,’ I said. Looking at the bones in her hands, I thought there was nothing to lose if I upset her. She couldn’t eat less. ‘You’re not the Messiah either. You might as well join in and have some chance of making a difference. On whatever scale.’
There was an alarming silence from the playroom.
‘It’s too late.’ She twisted her fingers.
I held out my hand to her as if she were Moth.
‘Come on, let’s see what Moth’s up to. And then I want to go down to the jetty and see if we can see the boat. I don’t like those clouds.’
By the time we had bundled Moth into his puddle suit and wellies, I needed the light on to tie my shoelaces. Outside, the sky hung low and the clouds had a purple tinge. The rain was provisional, a prelude to the torrents we could see hurrying across the sea towards the island. Raph would probably be enjoying it. I shifted Moth on to the other hip.
‘Down!’ he said.
He ran unsteadily towards the pebbled beach. I’m sure he wouldn’t really walk into the sea. The waves crashing on to the stones were taller than he is, a more obvious hazard than a glass cliff, and even toddlers must have some residual, atavistic sense of self-preservation or it is hard to see how we reached the over-populated mess in which we now find ourselves. The boat was coming round the headland, sitt
ing low in the water. Giles was steering for a point on the horizon wide of Colsay, avoiding turning side-on to the rising waves. I could see Raphael, a red curve in a grey seascape, kneeling in his favourite place in the bows, and the white lumps of Judith and Brian in the middle. I hoped Giles had thought to make Raph wear a harness as well as the lifejacket.
‘Your parents aren’t wearing lifejackets,’ I said.
Zoe shivered in the wind. ‘Mum probably thinks she can walk on water.’
Moth was arranging piles of small stones. Choking hazards. I went over to him, keeping an eye on the boat.
‘Moth, do you want to see the boat? With Daddy and Raph on it?’
He looked up. ‘No. Moth building a train. Where Moth’s bread?’
Damn, the bread. Forgotten again. I looked out to sea again. Giles had changed direction and was making for the landing stage. Raph waved.
‘Hold on to the boat,’ I muttered. ‘Never mind waving.’ I waved back.
‘Moth, do you want to wave to Raphael?’
‘No.’
My watching wouldn’t keep the boat afloat, but on the other hand if they foundered close to land I could jump off the rocks and save Raph. Assuming Moth stayed put while I did it. Assuming Raph wasn’t harnessed to the boat. Assuming I could get through the waves. And back. I decided the chance was worth letting the dough spill over. I stood there on the beach with Moth at my feet, poised to save one child from choking and the other from drowning, while Giles brought the boat to land. The rain gathered strength and began to hiss into the sea. I thought Zoe said something.
‘What?’ I shouted.
‘I don’t feel well. Do you mind if I go in?’
I picked up Moth and went towards her.
‘Down! Moth in a rain!’
‘Wait a minute,’ I said. ‘Go see Zoe. Zoe, are you OK?’
She applied a smile. Her face was bone yellow inside her hood.
‘I think I need to lie down.’