by Lucy Wood
You cook dinner together – something with spaghetti and cream and lots of garlic bread. ‘Customers say their dinners are sixty-eight per cent more enjoyable if they include garlic bread,’ you tell your mother. There is a film on TV that you both want to watch so you curl your legs up underneath you and share a blanket on the sofa. Your toes are almost touching. The film is not as good as you remembered. The happy ending is forecast from the very first scene. You drift off but your mother gets caught up in it and tries not to cry at the end. You remembered it being more realistic. There should be more films where couples drift apart slowly and without properly noticing until it’s too late, when they say things to each other like, ‘Which one of us bought that extension lead? No seriously, did you buy that extension lead or did I, because we’re both going to need that.’
The film makes you feel morose and lonely, but then you remember you’ve got Barnaby. You haven’t told your mother about him yet. You’re not sure how to talk about your relationship; whenever you think about it you feel confused and bored, as if you were trying to do a cryptic crossword. Either talk to her about Barnaby now or don’t. If you do, she will ask what he is like. Think for a while. Say he has the softest back you have ever felt; say he likes to answer his mobile as if his answerphone has picked up, so that you start to leave a message then realise it’s been him all along. Tell her how he really, really likes to do that.
‘Home?’ Barnaby said when you told him your weekend plans. You were lying in bed, his lips grazing your ear. ‘Going home?’ he said again. ‘What do you call this place then?’ And you just shrugged, suddenly unsure, feeling yourself in-between: the empty corridors of it, the neither-here-nor-there of it.
Once your mother has gone to bed, you prowl around the house. You have a few glasses of various drinks you find in the cupboard. You used to sit under the kitchen table for hours as a child, so you get in there and sit cross-legged with your head bowed down. It isn’t as relaxing as you remember so you unfold, crawl out and go upstairs to the bathroom. Your mother’s dressing-gown is on the back of the door and you put it on. The sleeves are too short for you. It is an old dressing-gown and it smells of that smell your mother has which you cannot place – some flowers you don’t recognise, or a perfume that she doesn’t seem to actually wear. Her things are scattered all around the bathroom and you look through them. There are shampoos and soaps and creams. This is your mother, here, in products. You rub her hand cream into your hands and you brush your teeth with her toothpaste. At one point, you take out that blue pot of cream and open the lid. You smell it, but it doesn’t smell of anything. You scoop some out and rub it over your eyes, hoping for the lovely blue shimmer it left on her lids. When you open them, there is a sudden sharp pain. Your eyes stream. Your eyelashes seem to be tightening. In a panic, you splash water all over your face and after a while the stinging goes away and you can open your eyes. They seem to turn pale green for a second, and then white again. You must be allergic to the ingredients; maybe there is orange extract in there, or walnuts. You look for the label but there isn’t one.
You decide to go to bed. In the hallway, you pass one of her empty vases, except that it isn’t empty any more. The whole vase is bursting with bright leaves. You must have drunk more than you thought. Drinking has never agreed with you, and you keep telling yourself this when you check the other vases and see that they too are filled with leaves and flowers and that there is now ivy curling over the banister.
The sheets on your single bed are your old favourites: Aladdin and Jasmine kneeling on a magic carpet. Their faces are faded and grey, the colours all washed out. You get underneath the covers and ring Barnaby on your mobile. The green light makes it look like you’re in an underwater cave. His phone rings and the answerphone beeps in. Wait for the beep and say hello and wait for him to reply. ‘Hello?’ you say. ‘Hellooo?’ But it’s his actual answerphone this time and your message will sound like you are lost, and somewhere very far away.
In the morning, you resolve to tell your mother to throw out that face cream. It has probably gone off – your mother never throws anything away. Rifling through the medicine box early on to get some paracetamol, you find cough linctus that is seven years past its use-by date and an old, dry packet of foot powder with a price label that is pre-decimal. You go back upstairs and sit in bed, waiting for her to get up. You have never liked houses early in the morning when no one else is around. They all have that still coldness that reminds you of museums, or the bright silence of empty swimming pools. She comes downstairs and pads into the kitchen. She switches on the kettle and you hear the clatter of cups and teaspoons, her quiet, early morning noises.
You pull on a jumper and go downstairs into the kitchen. You stop in the doorway. She is stirring tea with her back to you. There is a hand on her shoulder and it is not your hand. There is a man in the kitchen with his hand on your mother’s shoulder. He is shorter than her and has dark, curly hair. He is wearing a waistcoat. His clothes are made from a strange material that sometimes looks green and sometimes looks silver.
You make some sort of sound and they both turn around to look at you. Your mother smiles her normal smile and asks if you would like tea. She asks how you slept. She is making two cups, not three: one for her and one for you. You wait for her to say something. You wait for him to say something. She doesn’t say anything. He doesn’t say anything. The man isn’t even looking at you any more. You fiddle with your sleeves, your ears; you tie and re-tie your pyjama ribbon. Your mother hands you a cup of tea. You drink a big gulp straight away and burn the inside of your mouth and your lips. Your mother is acting as if the man isn’t there so she obviously can’t see him, and so you are obviously going mad, or something has damaged part of your brain. You have only taken drugs once, in fear of this, and so for it to have happened anyway seems a waste – you might as well have taken more. The man stays close to your mother as she tells you all about the lunch she is going to cook. Without pausing, she puts her arm behind her back and the man in the green waistcoat holds it. She does this so smoothly, so naturally, that you realise it is something she has been doing for a long time.
You are not sure if it takes seconds or minutes, but it suddenly strikes you that it is all to do with the cream. This man has always been there, right there, with your mother. He has appeared in front of your eyes like a slap in the face, like catching Santa outside the grotto reading FHM. You go upstairs and have a shower and get dressed. When you come back downstairs, your mother is standing at the oven cutting apples into a pan. The man in the green waistcoat is behind her with a hand on her hip. Her hip! You try not to stare. You try to act normally. You don’t want them to know that you know.
You sit on the sofa and think. There was always that story you didn’t really listen to, the one about your mother when she was younger, about her disappearing for months and then coming back like nothing had happened. The story hovered around your childhood but you never paid attention to it – after all, a lot of your friends’ mothers had the same story to tell. You zoned out; there were always more important things. A couple of times, your friend Michelle tried to talk about it. ‘My mum and yours were chosen to go there and look after all the little babies,’ she told you.
‘Where?’ you asked her.
‘I don’t know. The woods, I think.’
‘Why?’
‘I don’t know. They can’t look after them by themselves. Someone has to do it for them. They’re very small people. I don’t think you can look after babies if you’re that small.’ Your mother never looked after any babies other than you! You glared at Michelle and poked her doll right in the eye.
Maybe, once or twice, your mother tried to talk to you about it. ‘You know, when I was eighteen,’ she would venture, over dinner, over breakfast. But you were always too busy, you never really listened; your own life was too important, too interesting, to hear about things that she used to do. All that was in the past, it was irreleva
nt, which was your favourite word at the time.
The doorbell rings. It is your father and Rhea. Oh God, you had almost forgotten about your father and Rhea. The man in the green waistcoat squeezes your mother’s shoulder in a supportive way. You get the door. This is the first time you have met Rhea. Straight away she touches your new short haircut and says you look like Betty Boop.
‘More like David Hasselhoff,’ you say.
She laughs loudly and repeats Betty Boop. She seems like a kind lady. Her own hair is the longest you have ever seen; she could probably sit on it. It is brown and a bit dry, with grey streaks behind her ears. When she hugs your mother, her tall, thin frame towers over her and her hair swings round each side, shutting them in together like a tent. Your mother and father kiss lightly on each cheek. Your father has put on some weight and he is wearing a baggy knitted jumper which is bright blue with orange fish on it. It turns out that Rhea knits, a lot. You will probably get something knitted for Christmas, your father whispers conspiratorially. The man in the green waistcoat leans against the kitchen cupboards and watches. He doesn’t make any noise at all.
When everyone moves into the living room, on to sofas and chairs, he sits in the corner on the phone chair. It has a squishy leather pad but he doesn’t make a dent in it. He moves when your mother moves, as if he is a green balloon that she has tied around her wrist. At one point he catches you looking at him and frowns, ever so slightly. He has a long, pointed nose and pale, high cheekbones. You carry on staring, trying to cross your eyes a little as if you are staring blankly into space, until he seems to relax. You watch your mother carefully. She is smiling and laughing. Sometimes she looks over at the man in the corner. If you didn’t know that he was there you would think she was gazing wistfully into the distance.
Somehow, over lunch, the conversation gets on to your love life. You don’t know how it happened: you were trying as hard as you could to avoid it. Rhea wants to know if you have a boyfriend. Your father wants to know how you can afford your flat if you are living in it alone. By now, the man in the green waistcoat is standing behind your mother’s chair with his hands on her shoulders. He rubs her neck with his thumbs. Your mother rubs over his thumbs with her hands. This makes her look like she has a bad neck. You always thought she had a bad neck. You bought her a lavender-scented neck pillow last birthday which had to be heated up in the microwave. It smelled like yeast but she still used it.
‘Neck still bad?’ your father asks her.
‘It’s been better,’ she says. You go and get the lavender neck pillow, heat it up for thirty seconds, and drape it over her neck, over the strange man’s hands so that he has to move them. He sits back in the corner.
It strikes you that you are in a room of couples. It strikes you that they might all be feeling sorry for you. You can’t decide whether you should be blasé about love, about relationships, or say that you and Barnaby are practically engaged. Opt for blasé. Say that you’re seeing someone casually and with no strings. Say that you don’t want to commit yourself. After all, you’re young, you’re a career woman. Seventy-two per cent of customers book a double room but occupy it singly. Rhea nods vigorously. She knows what you mean. She starts talking about the relationship habits of fish. Some of them are casual as hell, she says, especially the females. Female seahorses leave all the pregnancy stuff to the males. It seems like a much better arrangement. ‘There’s feminism for you,’ she says. ‘But then again, most female fish that give birth die a few months later but the males don’t.’ She shrugs and frowns.
‘Nothing’s perfect,’ you say, pretending to know exactly what she is talking about. You ask if anyone wants coffee. Everyone does.
Afterwards, someone suggests a walk. It is a beautiful autumn afternoon. It is damp but sunny. The sky is clear. There are wet leaves everywhere. You walk along the road and then cut up a path that leads into the wood. The couples are holding hands. You are the odd one out: the fifth wheel, the kid who disturbs the babysitter and her boyfriend to ask for some milk. You wonder what would happen if you trod on the man in the green waistcoat’s feet. Would you feel it? Would he feel it? He is right in front of you but you don’t do it. Sometimes you think you can see the path through him. Your mother is talking to your father about lawnmowers because she needs a new one. He lists names and prices. He is a serious man who does a lot of research before he buys anything. He once had hiccups that lasted six months and now he rubs his throat a lot as he talks. You notice, underneath his thinning hair, that a few freckles have appeared, one by one, like murky stars.
A group of people walks towards you. They are dressed in waterproofs and have rucksacks and maps. You recognise the tall man in the middle with bright red hair: at fourteen, you thought he was the love of your life. You were convinced and planned a whole future together. As he walks closer, you catch his eye and then stick out your tongue, winking a big, cartoon wink. You used to do this to make him laugh. Your heart beats a little faster. You have always believed in fate, picturing it as a fairy godmother labouring over a huge timetable. The man starts and squints and doesn’t recognise you. He walks past. You’ve wasted a lot of time daydreaming about what would happen if you ever saw each other again. At least now you know. Your heartbeat slows down again.
The path enters the wood. It isn’t a big wood, but once you’re inside, it is hard to imagine where its edges are. As you walk, it increases ahead of you in roomfuls. The trees are in the last glorious stages of autumn colour. The ground is wet and there is moss everywhere, pushing up from the ground in thick cushions. The last of the wild garlic is dying back and so is all the bracken. It is an oak wood, but there are also elms and birches and holly trees, and all their branches are covered in lichen and ivy.
There is a faint path marked out by other people’s feet. Here and there, you see scattered litter: cans, crisp packets; there is even a mattress leaning against a tree like an overgrown mushroom. Small orange mushrooms with frilled throats have colonised a tree stump. There are beech-nut husks all over the ground. Although you are still close to the road, you can’t hear it in the wood. It is as if a door has swung shut behind you. You can hear a small stream somewhere and your own footsteps moving through earth and leaves. The wood smells damp and cold and of decay, but there is also a sweeter smell there – a half-familiar smell which you realise is the one that lingers around your mother’s clothes.
The man in the green waistcoat is smiling. He has left the path and is wading through the dense, tangled parts of the wood. You can definitely see the trees through him now, and the material of his waistcoat is veined like a leaf. Your mother veers off the path towards him. She moves easily through the wood. There is a brown leaf curling into her hair. She disappears behind a trunk and you hear her laugh – or maybe it was a bird trilling, you are not sure.
A cuckoo cuckoos somewhere in the distance. A pigeon crashes through the tree next to you. There are two more pigeons scrabbling around on the ground. ‘They’re staring at us,’ Rhea says. She has picked a handful of blackberries and is sharing them with your father, who never used to like them before.
You explain to them that pigeons are a hardy kind of bird. They eat what they can to survive. You respect this. Twelve per cent of customers won’t eat the breakfast because it is not cooked to order. Pigeons don’t expect cooked to order. If another animal threw up and there were seeds in it then they’d probably be happy.
It is cold and quiet. Your father has his arm around Rhea, a blackberry seed on his lip. Your mother appears and she blows a dandelion and the seeds rock weightlessly through the wood. She is standing next to you now and the man in the green waistcoat is holding her hand. You reach over and lift the leaf out of her hair. She turns and smiles at you. The light filtering through the canopy is green and gold and the shafts root themselves in the ground like so many trees.
You wonder when the cream will wear off. Will there be a point when you start to see the man in the green waistcoat fa
de like the reverse of a developing photo? When the ivy curling around the banisters hardens and turns back into wood and white paint? You watch your mother carefully. To everyone else, it looks like she is standing alone, wrapping her arms around herself. What you mistook for sadness is love.
You stare at her like this for a while then look away. When you look back his thumb is touching the smooth dip of her throat. Look again and they have gone – there are only the leaves rustling and the branches swaying in the wind. You can hear your mother’s footsteps somewhere close by but you cannot see her. You hear her laugh, or maybe it was just a bird trilling, you are not entirely sure.
Lights in Other People’s Houses
God keep us from rocks and shelving sands,
And save us from Breage and Germoe men’s hands.
Old sailors’ prayer
The morning the wrecker appeared was the hottest so far. The heat wave had been building slowly, gathering day by day. Tap water came out tepid. Paint split and peeled back; an empty glass that Maddy had left next to the window cracked.
Russell went from room to room, trying to find his shoes, his keys, his bike lock. He was running late again, always needing another ten minutes. ‘Are you going to sort out a few of those boxes today?’ he asked Maddy on his way through the kitchen.
Maddy was still in pyjamas and clutching her first mug of tea. She worked from home as an audio typist and it took her a while to get started. ‘Your keys are here,’ she said, pointing to the table. Russell had made the table himself. There was a knot in the wood that looked like a small, pale heart. Carpentry, Russell told her, is all about finding smaller shapes within bigger shapes – you have to be able to see what’s inside, lurking.