Diving Belles

by Lucy Wood

  The fireplace was dark. They stared in. It was dark but they could see something moving. There was a scuffling noise and something burst out of it, skimming their faces.

  ‘Jesus Christ!’ Danny yelled, and they both jerked back. The bird flew in circles close to the ceiling. It looked like a sparrow but it was hard to tell because it was covered in soot. It started bumping against the ceiling, sending down small showers of soot on to the carpet. Danny backed away from it. The bird was panicking and it made the room seem smaller and closer. Its wings brushed against the plaster.

  Rita walked slowly around the edge of the room and opened the window as wide as it would go. Cold air and a few flakes of snow came in. It was snowing harder now. There were soot marks on the ceiling and wall. Rita tried to usher the bird out. It flew towards the window then landed on the curtain rail. She moved the chair so it was under the rail and then reached for the bird. She leaned against Danny’s shoulder. Just as she was getting close, the bird flew out the door and into the hall.

  Danny ran out and opened the front door. Rita got down slowly from the chair. It was difficult; she was off balance. It was hard to bend each leg without her knees locking. She could feel the pull of the cliffs, could see them deep-ridged and braced against the wind.

  ‘It went out,’ Danny said. There was a single snowflake melting in his hair.

  ‘We don’t want to get stuck here,’ Rita said.

  As they slid the board back over the fireplace, she knocked her hip against the stone and it made a hollow clack. Danny stood in the middle of the room, looking round once more. The snowflake had melted and disappeared.

  ‘Come on,’ she said.

  He closed the door and locked it.

  ‘I’ll keep my fingers crossed for you,’ the neighbour said when Danny gave him the keys.

  The engine didn’t turn over all the way the first time Rita tried. Her heart gave a heavy thump. It started the second time. They drove back down the narrow lane. The tyre marks they had made on their way had almost been cancelled out by the snow. They were quiet in the car. Rita was concentrating on the road and on using the pedals with her stiff legs. Snowflakes landed and piled up on the windscreen.

  The road they needed to turn on to was closed. There was a police sign across the middle. The yellow diversion signs pointed left.

  ‘Shit,’ Rita said.

  ‘Maybe there was an accident,’ Danny said. ‘There must have been an accident if it’s a police sign.’

  Rita turned left. She couldn’t envisage where the diversion would take them, or how long it would add to the journey back. There weren’t any other cars on the road. Everywhere was quiet and empty. Danny didn’t turn the music back on. The heater whirred out warm air. Rita tapped her hand against the steering-wheel and hunched forwards. She drove slowly with her lights on, tried not to think about the car stranded at the side of the road, a painful walk in God knows what direction.

  She followed two more diversion signs before they were back on the main road and she knew where they were.

  ‘Do you know what Jack said to me the other day?’ Danny said. He leaned back in his seat. ‘He said that he and Sally are going to get a cat.’

  ‘What kind of cat?’ Rita hadn’t seen Jack and Sally for a long time. They were more Danny’s friends.

  ‘I don’t know. One of those rescue ones, I think.’

  ‘I can’t imagine them with a cat.’

  ‘That’s what I thought,’ Danny said. ‘That’s exactly what I thought.’ He stretched his legs out. He seemed to take up the whole car. ‘I thought that rescue cats could have real problems anyway, that you could wake up and find all your clothes ripped up, or dead rabbits under your bed or something.’

  She drove slowly past banked-up snow. A few more flakes hit the windscreen. Danny started talking about work and his longer hours. Rita could tell he was tired because his right eye got slightly lazy, the iris edging outwards like an orbiting planet. Sometimes, when he was really tired, he saw things: a hand waving in front of him, hundreds of horses at the side of the road. It used to scare her, when they were driving back from somewhere at night and he would say, ‘Look at all the horses,’ and there would be nothing but an empty road. Now she found herself watching him, slipping back into watching him, and she had to stop herself; she made herself concentrate on driving, on moving her stiff legs. Her stomach was hardening from the inside outwards, in rings like an old tree growing and hardening.

  ‘Hey, remember that cat you found and wanted us to keep?’ Danny asked. ‘You made it a bed in a box and fed it bits of potato.’ He laughed. ‘I told you we had to find the owners.’

  ‘You hit it with your car,’ Rita said. ‘We had to look after it until we found the owner.’

  Danny stopped laughing. He frowned. ‘No I didn’t.’

  ‘You did,’ Rita said. ‘It was OK, though, you didn’t hit it hard.’

  ‘That cat was just lost.’ He wiped at his fogged-up window. Snow had gathered on the pane. He frowned again and wiped the window.

  Rita wiped her own window with her glove, ended up smearing it more. ‘You’re right,’ she said at last. ‘I think it probably was just lost.’

  The road turned into a wide, residential street. They were almost back. She needed more salt. When they pulled in outside Danny’s flat, it was almost three o’ clock. She was desperate for more salt. She went inside with Danny and while he was taking off his shoes and coat, she went into the kitchen and poured herself a glass of water and tipped salt into it. Her hands were stiff and cracked. She fumbled with the glass and the tap. Danny came in just as she was finishing it, saw the salt pot out on the table. ‘Rita,’ he said. She shook her head. He looked at her feet, imagining the stone inside her boots.

  He walked her to the door. He was tall; he had to stoop in doorways.

  Her own house was cold. She kept her coat and scarf on. Already, as it always did when this happened, the house felt not quite her own: the furniture, the wallpaper, the small noises. She didn’t have long. She didn’t have time to phone work or to lock all the windows. She took out the bin bag but she couldn’t tie it up so she just folded the top over as well as she could. She clenched and unclenched her hands, trying to loosen them. Bending down was becoming difficult because of her hips and back. Her whole body was aching and tightening. As she bent, she could feel the discs in her back grating over one another, like an old gate opening over stones.

  Rita locked the door, left the key under the mat and went back outside. It was snowing harder now and flakes fell in fat patches on her shoulders and in her hair. She walked down the road and past all the houses. It wasn’t a long walk. She was glad it wasn’t long. Soon, the houses turned to fields and then cliffs and she walked up along the cliff path. The cliffs were covered in a light, ridged coating of snow. It hadn’t settled as thickly on them as it had in town. The sea was light grey and still and the sky was light grey and still and it was hard to tell one from the other.

  It was a struggle to walk now. It was difficult to breathe. Her legs grated together and her hips didn’t rotate. Her back was locked and rigid. She had her hands in her pockets and she clenched them and then couldn’t unclench them again. They stayed in tight fists in her pockets.

  The standing stones loomed out ahead through the snow. They made up a large, rough circle, set back from the edge of the cliff in a patch of long grass. Some were tall, some short, some leaning outwards, one had fallen over completely. There were fifteen stones there, but the number changed all the time. Some of them looked new, others were covered in lichen, which was white and webbed and looked as if the snow were creeping up the stone. There was an extra quietness that hovered around the circle, especially today, surrounded by the weather. Rita could imagine how cold each stone would feel if she touched them.

  She felt exhausted. She dragged herself down the path and reached the stones. She stood in a gap and waited. Snow was falling lightly and whirling in the wind up
on the cliffs. The wind pushed the flakes in one direction like lines of static. Over the sea, the water and the snow and sky were one grey haze. The wind keened faintly and when Rita looked up she saw a buzzard, circling and rising above her.

  She could feel the little clicks of stone against stone as her shoulders seized up and turned rigid. She made sure she was facing out to sea. The stone moved up into her neck and soon she couldn’t turn it at all. She chose a spot on the horizon to look at and after a while she couldn’t look away. She wasn’t afraid. The first time she had been afraid but she wasn’t any more. Breathing stopped, but there was a different kind of breathing. She let her thoughts wander.

  She thought of Danny, and of the house they had been to see. Did she like the house? She felt confused when she thought of it. Was she meant to have liked the house or not? The snow blurred it all so she couldn’t even remember where the house was. It was a relief, really. The whole thing was a relief. There was the house somewhere in the snow; there was the snow in Danny’s hair. She let her thoughts wander and they swooped upwards like birds, so that now she thought of a bird flying round a room, now she thought of someone singing, of marbles, of someone laughing in their sleep, of a bird flying round a room, of one lovely eye moving, of the wind, of lichen, a buzzard circling, a single snowflake, thrift, lichen and the wind.

  Of Mothers and Little People

  You arrive early and move quietly through your childhood house. You haven’t been here for months, or maybe over a year, and many things catch your eye: the lovely, smooth dents inside the washing machine that you used to run your palms over; the lopsided clock you made at school; vases with nothing but water inside. Why does your mother always have empty vases around? You’ve never asked. The late birthday card you sent is behind a banana magnet on the fridge. You open it. Your handwriting is terrible – rushed and sprawling over the shiny paper like dropped stitches. Sorry I couldn’t make it in the end, you know what it’s like, work, work, work, meetings … There is always work and there are always meetings.

  You drop your bag down on the carpet and go upstairs to find your mother. You want to surprise her. She will probably be busy preparing for your visit: maybe putting a book you might like on your bedside table, maybe dusting the bedside table with small, quick strokes. This is how you always think of her: watering plants in front of the dark kitchen window, or slowly scraping ice out of the freezer, small flakes melting around her knees; or just sitting, early in the morning, next to the radiator and her collection of decorated eggs. You imagine that she collects these eggs because she is, first and foremost, a mother. You tell Barnaby, the friend at work you are sleeping with, that you worry about your mother and those bright, patterned eggs. ‘Eggs?’ Barnaby says. ‘Mine’s allergic to eggs. Her throat swells up like a balloon. She has to carry a shot around in a necklace.’ He watches his screensaver as it flings out millions of tiny stars. But what you don’t know is that, long before your father left, he bought your mother the first egg randomly and impulsively, and after that, for birthdays and Christmases, everybody else followed suit, foisting eggs upon her like extra helpings of dessert.

  As you reach the landing, you hear her in the bathroom. She is talking to herself. She has done this as far back as you can remember – you hardly even notice it any more. You are thinking of the best way to announce yourself, something exuberant and witty, something to really make her day. What you want to do is banish all those lonely, quiet moments that you imagine are like cobwebs nestling in every corner of the house. What would be the best way? When you were six, you used to forward-roll through doorways and clatter heavily into her legs, or you would creep forwards across the shiny kitchen lino and wrap yourself around her feet. Sometimes, she would start walking over to the dishwasher, dragging you along slowly behind her like a mop, pretending that she didn’t notice you were there.

  You move forwards until you can see through the open bathroom door. There is your mother, leaning over the sink. She is wearing her gardening clothes – the baggy jeans with the damp brown knees and the red checked shirt that feels rough and scratchy against your cheek. Looking at your mother, you see her in smells and in touch, but really, you haven’t touched her properly for years. You are always rushing as you leave, hugging her loosely and briefly, so that, later on in the car, you only have a faint impression of her small body against yours.

  Now you are standing right in the doorway but she hasn’t seen you. She has taken a small blue pot from inside the cupboard and is unscrewing the lid. She is absorbed – you don’t think she would notice you if you coughed. You have seen this pot before. It was always kept on the highest shelf along with her razor and her prescriptions. You watch as she scoops out some thick cream and rubs it slowly over her eyelids. The cream leaves a strange, bluish shimmer over them, like the shimmer of fish scales or oil rainbowing a puddle. She rubs until all the cream has vanished, wincing as she does it. When she opens her eyes, you imagine for a second that the whites have been stained a pale green, but almost immediately they are white again. She blinks into the mirror and when she finally turns round and sees you, she doesn’t even jump. ‘Here you are,’ she says. You nod to confirm it, suddenly feeling big and invasive in her bathroom doorway. When she places her hand on the small of your back to guide you downstairs, towards the kettle, towards your favourite biscuits, you feel your own loneliness banished, you feel saved, which you don’t think is exactly the right way around. It isn’t exactly as you planned it. But in any case, you have arrived.

  It is still warm enough to sit in the garden. You tip up the plastic chairs to drain the water off the seats and flick off the maple leaves. The garden is small and yellow and brown and red. It drips with leftovers from the last shower of rain. The smell of wet soil in this garden is as familiar to you as the smell of your own hair. You can smell the sea here too, spreading its salty hands through the air. You tell your mother how strange it is to be somewhere so quiet. In your flat in the city, cars and trains bellow past without cease. You don’t have a garden, but once or twice, you and Barnaby have crawled out of the window on to next door’s roof and lain there like children gaping up at the sky.

  Your mother asks about your job. She is always interested in it. She works part-time in a bakery and has never used a computer. She thinks that the internet is a dangerous device for social control. You told that to your boss, Rachel. ‘Sweet,’ she said. ‘That’s really sweet. She reminds me of my mother. She doesn’t think you can microwave cling film, isn’t that crazy?’

  You tell her about the project you have just finished working on. You had to compile a report about customer satisfaction for a range of hotels. Many of the customers did not enjoy their stay. Some got locked in their rooms and had to bang on the door for help. Others found someone else’s crisps or socks or clumps of hair. They did not like the view out of the window or the self-service breakfast. ‘Your toaster does not toast!’ they wrote on the questionnaires. ‘I had to put the slice through four times!’ Every year, you make action plans for the hotel chain. In the action plan last year you suggested new toasters. This year, you suggested new toasters. It is in these small moments that you doubt the value of your work. This is a secret fear and one that you do not tell your mother. Perhaps you almost have, once or twice, but she has seemed distracted at those moments, shifting on her seat, rubbing her shoulder or the back of her neck. Anyway, you are generous, you do not want to burden her with your worries and leave her with them once you have driven away.

  ‘Work is A-OK,’ you say (you only ever say ‘A-OK’ around your mother. You also say ‘okey-dokey’ a lot and ‘Brillopads!’). ‘I got a new chair and a phone that says good morning to me when I come in.’

  ‘The chair says good morning?’ she asks.

  ‘Only the phone says that,’ you say. ‘The chair is just a normal chair.’ She shakes her head, amazed at a talking phone or disappointed in the chair, you can’t really tell. ‘Although, when the chair
swivels it squeaks and sounds as if it’s talking sometimes, and, get this, Barnaby makes up this mouse voice and he …’ You trail off, realising that your mother wouldn’t get the joke. The trees bend and shiver; they sound as though they are rifling through their own leaves for something lost.

  You’re about to tell your mother this but then a neighbour whose name you have forgotten walks past the fence and leans over. He smiles at your mother and laughs a lot. He has thick white hair and one of those ruddy glows which mean he is either outdoorsy or drunk. You wonder whether he will ask her out. Maybe he already has, although as far as you are aware, she has not been with anybody since your father left nine years ago. Now your father is getting married to a woman called Rhea he met at the aquarium. Rhea works at the aquarium, your father explained when he phoned you about it. She has a thing about fish. ‘What about my mother?’ you shouted at him, about seven years too late.

  ‘Myopia?’ he asked. The phone line buzzed with static – it’s a bad connection, you always mishear each other on it, your conversations full of gaps and holes that you spend hours trying to fill in later.

  You were worried about how to tell your mother, but when you finally did, she invited them over for a celebration lunch. This is why you are back this weekend. The lunch is tomorrow and, thankfully, you are between projects. You assume that she needs moral support – the invitation must be some kind of complicated, masochistic act. He left her! She shouldn’t cook for him; she should at least buy in some kind of ready meal. You are ready to fight some kind of battle. ‘You should get a date for this lunch,’ you tell her once the neighbour has left. Your mother says something inaudible and starts to clear the table. The cold and damp in the air have turned the high points in her cheeks and the tip of her nose a dark pink. To you, your mother is still the most beautiful person who ever lived. You don’t say this. Instead you say, ‘If you squint, that man could almost definitely be attractive. Almost like Steve Martin.’ Roxanne is her favourite film. She swats at you with a tea-towel. When you’re back inside, you show her the ready-made Yorkshire puddings you have brought along to help out.