by Alison Moore
When she noticed him, she jumped and said, ‘What are you doing here?’ Glancing at the untidy bed, she did not wait for a reply before saying, ‘I’ve only just got up. I wasn’t feeling well. It’s morning sickness, I suppose.’
The bedroom smelt of cigarette smoke and he said so. ‘I wish you wouldn’t smoke,’ he told her, coming into the room to straighten the covers on the bed.
It was Angela who, not long after this visit of Kenny’s and in the run-up to Christmas, said to Futh that she thought they should separate, and Futh was astonished. Later, though, he thought about how often he had caught her rolling her eyes or sighing, and he thought that perhaps, having seen all this before, he should have seen it coming.
His father and Gloria said, ‘But what about the baby?’ and Futh said that they had lost it, a phrase which did, he supposed, suggest some degree of culpability; perhaps it was like losing a ship which failed to face down some natural or man-made disaster.
It was agreed that Futh would be the one to move out, but he did nothing about it for months on end. It was Angela who finally found him a flat to move into and packed up his belongings and arranged for a removal firm to come and take them away.
He applies some sun cream to his neck and his legs, and then, with the sense that it is all downhill from here, he shoulders his rucksack again and sets off.
He is not carrying any lunch. He did not pocket anything at breakfast that morning, having eaten in a small, quiet dining room under the gaze of the proprietor. He is not aware of having passed a bakery on his way out of town and does not want to turn back and walk any further than he has to looking for one. The day’s hike is a relatively easy one. He expects to be at his next stop by mid-afternoon when, he decides, he will eat a late lunch and enjoy a rest.
He is nearing the end of his circular walk now. Tomorrow he will be back at Hellhaus and then he will be going home. Except that he will not be going home, he will be going to his new flat. He thinks of the big front door shared by all the tenants, and the hallway, the concrete floor onto which the bills and circulars drop. He thinks about the buzzers and pigeonholes with these strangers’ names written underneath them on little slips of paper. The name on his, he thinks, will be missing, or somebody else’s name will be there instead. He thinks about his unknown predecessor, and the bed whose mattress is stained by and sags from the weight of the strangers who have been there before him. At least the flat is furnished. There are cupboards and drawers into which he will put his belongings which, at present, are wrapped and packed into boxes which Angela has labelled. There are carpets and curtains but no lightshades. There is a sofa but there are no cushions. There is a kettle and a microwave oven but no washing machine. There is a television and a phone line but no phone.
It reminds him of his first student flat, except that he did not live alone there.
He thinks of the things he needs to do. He needs to buy plates and cups and cutlery, although he could make do, at first, with paper plates and plastic cutlery, disposable things. He needs cushions and bedding, lightshades and lightbulbs. Perhaps, he thinks, he ought to have wine glasses and coffee-table books. He needs to get a phone connected, and to write his name on little bits of paper and put them on his buzzer and his pigeonhole.
By midday, the heat is quite fierce. There is not a single cloud in the blue sky. Futh puts sun cream on his already peeling skin – on his face and up beyond the receding line of his thinning hair. His father, who is now almost eighty, still has pretty much a full head of hair. Futh wonders whether he takes after his granddad, the one who never made it home. Ernst said that he did. Futh only remembers his granddad as a balding man close to death.
In the early afternoon, Futh notices that his feet are burnt. The skin is hot and pink between the straps of his sandals, and still blue-white underneath the straps, like the perfect band of pale skin on a ring finger when a wedding ring is removed for the first time in years.
It is also then that he realises that he is lost.
He stands in a field looking at his map, looking around for the features which ought to be there but are not. He has no sense of direction. But he does have that compass, which he now fishes out of a side pocket of his rucksack. He cannot get any sense out of it though and finally realises that it is broken. He looks up at the sun. It is high in the sky and does not help him. He turns, gazing back at the path of trampled grass along which he has come. Considering retracing his steps, he wonders about all the points along the way at which he might have made a mistake, missed a turning, lost in thought.
He decides to press on until he finds someone who knows where he is and which way he needs to go. After walking for well over an hour without seeing anyone at all and without any shelter from the sun, he comes, in the middle of the afternoon, to a small village.
Seeing a man standing smoking outside a house, Futh approaches, holding out his map and asking his whereabouts in German. The man takes the map and studies it, his cigarette burning between his lips, ash spilling into the folds of the map. Behind the man, a kitchen window opens. A woman is busy inside. A baking smell wafts out and mingles with the cigarette smoke.
When the man puts his finger on the map, Futh sees just how far astray he has gone. He has been walking in the wrong direction for hours. He has as far to go now as he had when he set out after breakfast – perhaps further, despite walking all morning and half the afternoon.
The man asks him where he has come from and where he is going. Futh tells him and the man says, ‘No, you want to be going in the other direction.’
The woman in the kitchen has moved out of sight, and the man is holding out the map for Futh to take back, the cigarette between his fingers burnt down to the filter. Futh, taking the map and thanking the man, walks slowly away, and the smell of cigarette smoke and baking fades until it is gone, leaving only the spilt ash on his fingertips and saliva in his mouth.
His mother smoked on occasion, generally when she finished something big, something difficult. His father did not like the habit and so she smoked furtively. Futh knew of only a handful of instances when she smoked in his whole childhood – when she passed her driving test, when she got her Open University degree, when she finished painting the old house from top to bottom ready for selling. The only time he saw her smoking openly was when they were up on the cliffs in Cornwall just before she left, when she alternated between sunbathing on her back and propping herself up on one elbow with a cigarette.
His father, sitting not far away on a picnic blanket, must have noticed but had not commented on it. Instead, he sat facing the twinkling sea, delivering a monologue on the subject of the lighthouse in front of them.
He talked about lighthouse technology – sunlight and lamplight and the use of mirrors. And he talked about lighthouse keepers, using words and phrases such as ‘tending’ and ‘caring for’, so that the lighthouse, in which the lighthouse keeper endlessly polished the many lenses and windows, seemed to Futh a calm place, a safe place, as if the light were one of welcome, a light to guide you home. ‘Of course,’ said his father, ‘it’s all automated now,’ and it was clear from his tone that he found the automated lighthouse a disappointing substitute for a lighthouse keeper.
He talked about ships which had been wrecked and plundered, some of them not so long ago and perhaps even to this day, despite the lighthouse and its recurrent warnings.
It was scorching. There was a breeze, but when it dropped, the heat was astonishing. Futh, wearing long trousers and walking boots with thick socks, was far too hot. His mother’s boots and socks and top were in a heap nearby. His mother was lying on the dry grass with the sun on her bared skin, a tube of sunblock and a packet of cigarettes and a lighter in between her feet. Her eyes were closed so it was hard to tell whether she was sleeping or silently listening to the lecture. But now she opened her eyes and sat up, reaching for her cigarettes. She looked at her husband and made a little noise of exasperation, but he did not notice.
‘Every lighthouse,’ he said, ‘has its own distinctive flash pattern.’ Futh wondered whether anyone was expected to remember them all or if there was a manual. You just had to know what you were doing, he supposed, if you were going to go to sea.
His mother rolled her eyes and picked up her lighter, looking at Futh’s father, at his profile, as she lit a cigarette, the smell of smoke overwhelming the scent of her sun cream. His father stiffened, paused, and then went on.
‘In fog,’ he said, ‘the foghorn is used.’
Futh, deciding to take a walk, stood up and ambled away. He felt his mother watching him go, but when he glanced back she was not looking at him. He wandered further, until he could no longer hear the drone of his father’s voice. He was holding the perfume case which he had taken out of his mother’s handbag, the silver lighthouse which his granddad had given to his father. His mother called it ‘Uncle Ernst’s perfume’ as if she were just keeping it safe for him, but she wore it a lot of the time. Futh took the glass vial out of its case. He wanted to smell his mother’s scent but he did not remove the stopper.
Futh used to sit in his mother’s wardrobe, the floor of which was covered with shoes which seemed never to have been worn, and at one end he made a nest. He closed the doors and sat there with the hemlines of her woollen skirts brushing his face. This, the dark interior of her wardrobe, the smell of leather and secret cigarette smoke and camphor from the mothballs she used in the summer, is what he would have liked to bottle and label ‘Essence of Mother’, but instead he has violets and oranges.
He was in the wardrobe when he heard his parents coming into their room. He heard their argument through the wardrobe doors. Futh sat very still, safe in this darkness which smelt of his mother, muffled by the woollens. After a while, hearing nothing in the bedroom, he opened the wardrobe door, very slowly and just a little. He saw his mother standing at the end of the bed, looking into her suitcase which was open on top of the bedspread. She stood there for a long time before zipping it up. When she lifted it onto the floor and put it away under the bed, he could tell that it was heavy. He watched her leave the room, heard her go downstairs, and then he climbed out of the wardrobe and pulled her suitcase out again. It was brightly coloured, garish, and he instantly hated it. It was packed with clothes and shoes and toiletries, everything she might need if she were going away. He could tell that she had not just packed it by the creases in clothes which ought to have been hanging in the wardrobe. This was a suitcase which was kept ready-packed as if she might need to make a quick getaway.
Up on the cliffs, there was nowhere to go. The landscape was unbroken. There was no shelter, no shade. He went back, strolling slowly over the grass, holding the silver lighthouse in one hand and the stoppered vial in the other. His father was still sitting looking outwards, facing the lighthouse and the mass of rocks on which it stood. He had fallen silent. His mother had finished her cigarette and was lying on her back again. She looked relaxed. Her face was turned to the sun.
And then his father took a deep breath and began again. ‘The foghorn,’ he said, ‘blasts every thirty seconds.’
‘Do you know,’ Futh heard his mother say, ‘how much you bore me?’
After a moment, in which nothing was said and no one moved, his father stood and began to pack up the picnic, closing the lid on the cool-box, pouring cold dregs of coffee into the grass before putting the lid and the cups back on the Thermos, tossing the empty Pomagne bottle and the uneaten bread and pastry crusts and crumbs over the side of the cliff where they dropped onto ledges and rocks and into the sea and gulls appeared from nowhere, making an incredible noise. He picked up the picnic blanket, shook it out and folded it up.
His wife was still lying in the sunshine with her eyes closed. He walked slowly towards her until he stood above her. His shadow did not touch her and she did not open her eyes. Futh watched the circling gulls swooping down and attacking the scraps, making their din. When he looked, his mother was getting to her feet. She was turned away from him, holding her hand against the side of her face. She said, ‘I’m going home.’
She picked up the cool-box and Futh noticed the redness like sunburn on her cheek. Futh’s father took the bag and the blanket and walked with her towards the path. Futh looked down and saw the deep cut on the palm of his hand. The glass vial was broken, the perfume stinging in his wound, spilt on the grass and on his hiking boots.
Walking back to the caravan site, lagging behind his parents, he heard them talking although he did not catch much of what they were saying. He heard his father say, ‘What about him?’ and he saw his mother shrug.
Before the end of the afternoon, they were on the train. His mother, wanting something, looked in the rucksack and found a couple of oranges. She offered one to Futh, who took it, not really wanting it but not wanting to refuse it. He ate it slowly and was still eating it when his mother, having thrown away her peel and wiped her hands, leaned her head against the window and closed her eyes.
That night, back in his own bed, Futh heard his mother in the shower. When she came to his room, standing by his pillow in her dressing gown, her face hanging over him like the moon in the night sky, she no longer smelt of violets or sun cream or the oranges they had eaten on the way home. She smelt of the cigarettes she liked to smoke when she finished something.
When Angela came to bed smelling of cigarette smoke, it was his mother he thought of, although he knew better now than to say so to Angela. And Angela, he supposed, was thinking of Kenny, whose cigarettes it was she smelt and tasted of.
He retraces his steps, but this time he takes the path which will deliver him to his last stop before Hellhaus. There is no signpost, just an opening in a hedge, a narrow gap leading from one small path to another. He is not surprised he missed it the first time and he is not certain even now that he is going the right way. He begins to feel little but the sting of his sandal straps sawing against his sunburn and his new blisters.
When he finally reaches his hotel he is exhausted. He runs a bath, takes a couple of miniatures out of the fridge in his room and goes onto the balcony. He has a view of the river. He is almost close enough to the water, he thinks, to jump in from here.
He is starving. He has not eaten since breakfast. He looks at the menu from the hotel restaurant and realises that he has just missed dinner. He will have to make do with a bar snack after his bath.
He undresses, selects another bottle from the mini-bar, goes into the bathroom and climbs into the tub. The water is painfully hot and he lies back with a groan and closes his eyes.
He feels as if he is missing something and tries to think what it might be. He missed his father’s roast on Sunday. He misses his stick insects, the smell of their vivarium. Angela will be keeping the stick insects because Futh is not allowed pets at the flat. Angela has never liked the stick insects. She says that they are the kind of thing a schoolboy keeps. She finds them creepy, and Futh is worried that she will not look after them properly, that she will forget to feed them.
He wakes feeling chilly. He does not know, for a moment, where he is. Even when he remembers, he is still bewildered because he is lying in an empty tub – all the water must have seeped out around an ill-fitting plug. He has no idea what time it is – his watch is in the bedroom and there is no window in the bathroom, no darkened sky to give him a clue.
His legs have seized up, and he is hungrier than he has ever been – his stomach is growling. His Aunt Frieda used to say, when Futh skipped meals, ‘Your stomach will think your throat has been slit.’
He can barely manage to get himself out of the bath, but he does. Hobbling into the bedroom, he sees, through the wide-open balcony doors, the night sky, the moon. He goes outside again for a moment, clinging to the railings and watching the river go by. Listing slightly from the spirits, his stomach complaining, he feels as if he is on a ferry and thinks that he would be very happy never to be on one again.
He can’t face callin
g down for food now. He is too tired to wait for it, too tired to eat. It is not really a bar snack he wanted anyway. He closes the balcony doors and the curtains. As he crawls into bed, he looks at the time and realises that it is already Friday. In twenty-four hours his holiday will be over.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Venus Flytraps
Ester, stirring, smells camphor. Without opening her eyes, she moves closer to Bernard’s side of the bed and puts her head on the edge of his pillow, inhaling his scent.
Bernard will not be back until tomorrow. Sometimes he calls at the last moment to tell Ester that his mother needs him, that he will be staying longer.
He visits his mother once a month. When Ester and Bernard were first married, Ester used to go with him, although she found the trips stressful. She was glad to have been invited back into Ida’s home but she was unable to think of her mother-in-law without feeling the scrape of the hair pin against her scalp. She used to take a little bottle of gin in her handbag and drink from it when they stopped for petrol and whenever she went to the bathroom.
The very first time they went as a married couple, Ida greeted them brightly at the door. She complimented the flowers Ester had brought for her, displaying them in her best vase on the living room table. She went to make coffee, refusing Ester’s offer of help. She said, ‘You stay right where you are.’ In the morning, Ida brought breakfast in bed. She gave Ester a magazine to read while lunch was being prepared. She would not even let Ester wash up.
Conrad still lived at home and Ester had always hoped to see him during these visits. But each time they went, he made himself scarce. Once, in the car on the way to Ida’s, she asked Bernard whether he was expecting his brother to be there. At first he did not respond and much of the journey passed in silence, her unanswered question sinking like cold air in the overheated car. She began to wonder whether she had asked the question out loud. And then, as they neared his mother’s house, he said to her, ‘Why do you care whether he’s there or not? You’re with me now. Or have you changed your mind again?’