by Alison Moore
‘But why did your dad leave?’ asked Futh.
‘Well, he couldn’t stay,’ said Kenny, ‘knowing about the affair, could he?’
When primary school ended and Futh’s mother left and Futh began to spend his free time sitting on his climbing frame in the dark, he found himself thinking about Kenny, whom he had not seen in the two years since their meeting at the butcher’s. He looked at Kenny’s empty bedroom window, underneath which Gloria ate her supper alone in the kitchen.
She never seemed to have friends over, female friends like his mother had, who used to gather in the living room or on the patio in good weather, and sometimes his mother played a favourite song, her favourite singer, and started dancing, while he played by himself nearby, told to stay out of the way, getting as close as he dared, mesmerised by the noise and the perfume and the minidressed legs of his mother’s friends. Gloria had not been one of them.
He got to know Gloria’s habits. When she came into the kitchen to prepare her evening meal, she would turn on the radio. She would open the back door to call in the cat and feed it titbits from her plate while she was eating. When she finished, she would clear up and then, leaving the radio on, she would go upstairs to take a shower or a bath, and he would see her, the vague pinkness of her, fragmented by the bathroom window’s bobbled glass. She would come back down in her nightie, sit at the kitchen table and have a drink or two. She would feed the cat again, maybe take out the rubbish, or, in that summer of drought, soak her garden with the hosepipe in the dark. Alone in a street full of parched and pale lawns, while neighbours’ plants wilted and died, Gloria’s garden was lush.
The back door opened and Gloria appeared on her doorstep with a rubbish bag, but instead of going to the bins she walked onto the lawn, coming his way in her nightie, bringing the rubbish bag with her.
Leaning against the fence, she said, ‘All on your lonesome?’
Not knowing what to say, Futh said nothing.
‘Me too,’ she said, twirling the rubbish bag in her hand. ‘I could do with some company.’
‘I’ve got to go in soon,’ said Futh.
Gloria looked over Futh’s shoulder at the house, at the lit kitchen window. ‘What you and your daddy need now,’ she said, ‘is a nice holiday. That’s what I did when my husband left me. I went off on holiday. After a fortnight of sunshine and cocktails, I wasn’t even thinking about him.’
Futh, hearing his father calling him, turned around and was beckoned inside. When Futh turned back, Gloria was already walking away with her rubbish bag.
‘What did she want?’ asked his father, as Futh stepped into the kitchen.
‘She just came over to talk to me,’ said Futh.
‘What did she say?’
‘She said she was lonely.’
‘I don’t want you talking to her,’ said his father.
There were bowls of oxtail soup on the table. They sat down and ate, and Futh, through the curtainless window and across the dark back gardens, saw Gloria’s kitchen light and all her downstairs lights go off. A minute later, he saw her bathroom light go on again.
There was a curtain rail there, above the kitchen window. When they moved into this house, when Futh was seven, his mother had measured up for curtains, but she never got round to making them before she left. She had planned to paint the house from top to bottom, but had only done the landing when she stopped and did no more. Most of the pictures she brought from the old house were never hung, and the flowerbeds were planted but then grew wild.
His father, polishing off his oxtail soup, standing and reaching for his slip-on shoes, said, ‘I’m going out. Finish up, it’s your bedtime.’ When he opened the kitchen door, the cold night air came in and stayed when he was gone.
Gloria’s bathroom light went off and Futh saw Gloria coming into her bedroom. He shovelled his soup, chasing the last bits of meat around the bottom of the bowl. He saw her in front of her dressing table mirror, checking the look of herself in her nightie, touching her hair. She went back out onto the landing. A moment later, the light in the downstairs hallway went on, and when it went off again Futh stood quickly, put his empty soup bowl in the sink and went to bed.
He wakes in darkness. He can’t see a thing and doesn’t know where he is.
‘Where am I?’ he asks, before grasping that he is alone. He thinks he must be in the spare room, but everything feels wrong. Then he thinks he might be in his second-hand bed at the new flat but that does not seem right either. Finally he realises that he is on the ferry. He is on holiday, he thinks, that’s all, he is going on holiday, and he goes back to sleep.
He and his father had a daytime crossing to Europe. As well as taking him to the cinema and letting him have popcorn, his father bought him sweets in a mug from the duty-free shop and too many packets of peanuts at the bar and Futh felt sick in the car all the way from the ferry to their hotel in Germany.
Their hotel room had two single beds and a small bathroom. At bedtime, when Futh wanted a night light, his father put the bathroom light on and left the door ajar, and then said, ‘Go to sleep now.’ But Futh lay awake, turned towards that crack of light, watching in the big mirror behind the sink as his father changed his shirt and combed his hair and brushed his teeth and then – Futh quickly closing his eyes and trying to breathe like someone sleeping – he left, the door clicking shut behind him.
In the morning, his father would be there, in the other single bed, dozing with his mouth open, the odour of alcohol seeping out. When Futh got out of bed to go to the bathroom, his father would stir, asking, with eyes narrowed against the daylight, what time it was. Futh would tell him, and his father would be surprised by how late it was. He would say to Futh, ‘You slept well.’ And Futh would say nothing about when, disturbed in the early hours, he saw the bedroom door opening, the light coming in from the corridor, his father returning with a woman, a different woman every night. When the door shut behind them, his father and these women felt their way through the bedroom still dimly lit by the light from the bathroom into which his father took them, the bathroom light briefly flooding the bedroom before the door was again closed leaving only the narrow gap through which Futh watched them in the mirror. And Futh, who had not slept well, stood in the bathroom in the morning, not wanting to touch the sink area, not wanting to look in the mirror.
He said nothing to his father about having woken up to find himself wetting the bed. He pulled his blanket over the wet sheets and got ready to go out, knowing that it would all be made clean in his absence.
Futh opens his eyes in the dark and hears a woman speaking to him loudly in a language he does not understand. He squints in the direction of his travel clock, trying to make sense of the position of the luminous hands. He can’t see the underside of the bunk right above him, and he reaches out and touches it to reassure himself that he is where he thinks he is. Then, feeling for the switch on the wall, he turns on the light.
It is morning and the ferry is arriving into the Hook of Holland. Futh gets up.
In the shower, in an apple-scented lather, he thinks about Angela. He wonders what she did with her Friday night and what she is planning to do with her Saturday. They have spent most of their Friday evenings on the sofa watching television. Now, early on a Saturday morning, he imagines her barely home from a night out, or in bed asleep, or not asleep, with another man. It is more than fifteen years since he was with anyone else.
Turning off the shower and stepping out of the cubicle onto the non-slip floor, he finds himself still thinking about his father and the women in the hotel bathroom. He leans against the sink area, wipes his hand over the steamed-up mirror and looks again at his reflection. He does not see his father in himself.
Back in the bedroom, he dresses, returning the silver lighthouse to his trouser pocket. He goes around collecting up the complimentary items – a Biro, sachets of coffee and sugar and individual portions of UHT milk, the remaining toiletry miniatures, a shower cap, the
plastic cup – and packs them in his overnight bag. He can make use of all these things in his new flat.
He leaves his cabin, taking his bag and his anorak with him, not wanting to have to come back. He goes to look for some breakfast, but when he is standing at the edge of the restaurant, eyeing the queue and smelling the warm egg, the warm meat, he changes his mind. Instead, putting on his anorak and shouldering his bag, he heads for the outer deck.
It has been raining and is still raining behind them, mizzling into the sea. The metal steps are slippery and he has to go carefully. The sky overhead is a pale grey but it is clearing up over Holland as they draw near. He stands with his hands on the wet railings, watching the ferry’s arrival into the Dutch terminal, and on the other side of the deck, the man in the raincoat who lost his hat does the same.
Futh moves his watch on an hour. Now he will go down to the car deck. When he is waved forward, he will drive out onto the continent, behind the wheel in another country for the first time.
‘Not long now.’
Futh turns and finds the man standing beside him.
‘Where in Germany are you going?’ asks the man.
‘Hellhaus,’ says Futh. ‘Near Koblenz. It’s quite a long drive.’
‘Oh, it won’t take you long,’ says the man. ‘A few hours.’
‘If I don’t go wrong,’ says Futh, picturing the pristine European road atlas on his passenger seat. Angela has always done the long-distance driving and is also the better navigator.
The ferry is docking. ‘We should head down to the car deck,’ says Futh.
‘I’m on foot,’ says the man.
‘Where did you say you’re going?’
‘Utrecht. It’s not far from here. You’ll go right past it on your way to Koblenz. You should stop there for coffee if you have time.’
Futh looks at the man’s damp coat, smells the rain trapped in its weave. He looks at the residue of rain on the man’s eyelashes, on his eyebrows, on his bare head. He imagines this man in his passenger seat, reading the map and knowing the roads. He says, ‘Would you like a lift to Utrecht?’
The man beams. ‘Well,’ he says, ‘if you’re going there anyway, that would be very kind. You can have coffee at my mother’s house.’
‘I’d like that,’ says Futh, ‘very much.’
The man holds out his hand and says, ‘Carl.’
Carl’s hand is big and tanned and, Futh finds as he takes it, warm. Futh’s own hand – slim and pale and cold – seems lost inside it. ‘Futh,’ he says in reply. Carl leans closer, turning one ear towards him as if he has not quite caught it, and Futh has to say again, ‘Futh.’
The two men turn away from the railings to head inside together. The boat’s wet surfaces gleam in the early morning sunlight, and Futh wonders how long the ferry will stay in the brightening port before turning around and going out again, back out into the cold, grey sea.
CHAPTER TWO
Breasts
Ester gets herself comfortable on her high stool at the bar and removes her rubber gloves. She adds a little tonic to the shot of gin in front of her and drinks it down. She likes to have her first drink of the day when she finishes the downstairs rooms.
It is just after eleven. It is always quiet at this time, just before lunch. There is only herself and the new girl and one customer, a man at the other end of the bar. She is aware of him staring at her but she does not turn and look at him, not yet.
When she puts down her glass, she spots a smear on the rim, a red lipstick stain which is not hers. She calls the new girl over, holding out the glass for her to see, but the girl just takes it, thinking only that she is being given Ester’s dirty glass.
Ester sits with one foot resting on the crossbar of her stool and the other foot touching the floor, a position which makes her look as if she is on the point of going somewhere, but she is not. She can see herself reflected in the mirrors behind the bottles on the shelves. She spent a long time that morning at her dressing table trying to get her face right, but she can see, looking at herself now in the space between two bottles of mediocre red wine, that the make-up around her right eye and on her cheekbone is too heavy.
Her vest top shows off the bruises on her upper arms, rows of dark ovals like smudgy police station fingerprints, as well as her slackening bosom and the tattoo above her left breast – a rose, fully open, the petals loose and beginning to drop. Her top’s thin straps sink into her flesh, which is pale and doughy like uncooked pastry.
Now she looks at him, at the lone customer, a middle-aged man standing a few metres away. His broad shoulders are rounded, hunched over the bar. With his flat backside and short, thin legs, he makes the shape of a question mark. He is drinking a cup of coffee and peeling a hard-boiled egg, still watching her.
Ester, speaking German, says, ‘You’re not a guest here.’
‘No,’ he says. ‘I came in for breakfast.’ Making small talk, he moves up the bar towards her with his naked egg, the white giving between his broad thumb and his short fingers. He stands so close that his foot is touching hers, but she doesn’t move hers away. He bites into his egg and she hears it being wetly masticated inside his mouth.
She fingers her hair, which is yellowy like the rubber gloves, like the crumbly egg yolk. She says, ‘I have to get back to work. I’m just taking a break.’
‘I have places to be as well,’ he says, and Ester sees the eggy, claggy inside of his opening and closing mouth. ‘I’m just passing through.’
She notices the butterfly tattoo on the back of his other hand, the hand which is not holding the egg, the thumb of which is hooked into his belt at the buckle. She gets down from her stool and walks to the internal door which leads to the guest rooms, glancing back at him before going through.
The man puts the last of the egg in his mouth and follows her, leaving the broken eggshell behind him on the bar.
He lies on his back in a bed which was vacated that morning by an American couple, whose dark hairs Ester can still see on the pillowcases. He is looking brazenly, unblinkingly, at her breasts and nothing else.
In her flat-chested youth, Ester collected pictures of other young women’s breasts in a scrapbook – breasts in bras from the underwear pages of her mother’s catalogues, breasts in bikinis from travel brochures, bare breasts from the plastic surgery adverts at the back of her mother’s magazines and from the magazines her father kept under his side of the mattress. As a teenager, she spent a great deal of time poring over these pictures of coveted breasts. Now nearing forty, she has almost forgotten this phase, but this man’s gaze reminds her of herself in her bedroom with her scrapbook on her lap. She gets onto the bed, and he does not take his eyes off her breasts, and she does not really look at him at all, looks near him, past him. When he has finished, he closes his eyes and falls asleep.
He was quick, but that’s just as well. Ester still has two rooms to do before lunchtime. There are toilets and sinks and baths to be cleaned, floors to be mopped, carpets to be vacuumed, beds to be made, including the one they are lying in.
In the past, she always used beds she had already changed, but since receiving complaints about the sheets, she makes sure to use rooms she has not yet cleaned. Or she uses rooms whose occupants are out for the day, brushing off and straightening up the bedding afterwards, and sometimes, while she is there, browsing the contents of drawers and suitcases, picking up perfumes and lipsticks, testing them on herself. If guests ever notice their possessions, these small items, going missing, they rarely say anything.
Ester looks at the man lying asleep at her side. He is turned towards her, the ends of his fingers resting on her arm, just touching her, his butterfly still reaching for her spoiling rose. He has a crumb of egg yolk in the stubble at the corner of his mouth. She moves away, and his fingertips slip from her skin.
Sitting on the edge of the mattress, she leans down and gathers her clothes from the floor. She puts them on, picking off hairs.
&nbs
p; His jeans lie tangled at the end of the bed and she reaches for them, going through his pockets and finding a packet of cigarettes and a red Bic lighter. She takes a cigarette to the open window to light it, leaning her bare elbows on the sill and watching the people going by down below. When she exhales, her smoke puffs out over their heads like bad weather.
Dropping the burning cigarette end out of the window, not waiting to see it land, to see the sparks as it hits the pavement, she turns away. She pauses in front of a full-length mirror to tidy her hair and her face, the smeared pink of her lipstick. Then, slipping her feet into her flats, she leaves the room.
She is a few steps away from the still-closing door when she sees Bernard arrive at the top of the stairs at the other end of the corridor. He looks her way, sees her, and holds up the rubber gloves which she left on the bar beside her tonic bottle. She walks steadily towards him, takes the gloves and thanks him, and then fetches the cleaning cart she has already sent up in the lift. Wheeling it into the next bedroom, room six, she is aware of Bernard watching her before turning and going back down the stairs to the bar.
Ester goes first into the small en suite bathroom and picks up the used towels which have been left damp on the floor. She sprays disinfectant onto a cloth and wipes down the toilet, pours bleach into the bowl. She cleans the bath, pulling a clump of hair from the plughole. Rinsing her cloth and squirting more disinfectant, she polishes the sink and the tooth glass. She mops the lino, straightens the shower curtain, puts out clean towels and complimentary soap.
In the bedroom, she strips the sheet from the bed, shakes it out and inspects it and then smooths it over the mattress again. She turns over the pillows, plumping them up. She wipes down the laminate furniture, hoovers the carpet and sprays the room with air freshener. As she unplugs the vacuum cleaner, she hears footsteps in the corridor, heavy shoes coming from the far end, passing the door of the room she is in and going down the stairs.