“Hello?”
But there was nothing on the other end of the line but the sound of the ocean as it filled her ears as she made the slow descent down through the water.
“Hello? Hello? This is Mrs Armitage, Mrs Araminta Armitage. If you can hear me, I can’t hear you. So if you really need to speak to me, you’ll have to call back and try again. I’m going to hang up the phone now.”
And then, as if the woman who spoke was very frightened, perhaps as if she was trying not to be heard:
“Is he there? Is my son there?”
Was that the line still roaring in her ear, or was it the swirl of her blood as her heart squeezed tight and then let go again?
“Do you have him? You have to keep him safe for me –”
A pause, and a raggedy hitch of breath.
“Can you hear me? Can you hear me? You said you’d help me. I need you to promise me –”
“I’m afraid I can’t hear you,” Mrs Armitage repeated. “I’m going to have to hang up the phone now. Goodbye.”
“No, please –”
She stood for a few moments in the golden evening light that flooded her living-room, listening to her breath and her heartbeat, checking for signs of disturbance. She lived alone. She had to be careful. But there was nothing to worry about, nothing at all. She could return the phone to its cradle and go back to the kitchen and finish the washing-up. The handset wouldn’t fit back into the cradle, it jumped about like a live thing and threatened to throw itself onto the floor, but she gripped it with a firm hand and forced it to dock onto the little connectors and then it was fine. The world was going to behave itself. The sight of her own living-room, orderly and familiar and empty of everyone but herself, filled her with calm. With the fence gone, there was nothing to shut out the light or hide the sky. She would sit in here much more often in the evenings from now on.
She’d put the bowl in the drying-rack and reached for the saucepan when someone knocked at her front door. First the phone, and now the door. The universe had remembered her.
Don’t be ridiculous, she told herself sternly, inside her head. She was pleased that she had the sense not to speak out loud. She had no idea who might be listening. You can ignore it if you want. It’s an invitation to answer, not a summons. Wait a minute and they’ll go away again. You don’t even need to stop washing up. The saucepan looked clean after its rinsing but she dipped it into the sudsy water anyway. The knock came again. I’m not answering that. I don’t feel like it. They can’t see me in here. So whoever it is can come back another time.
A third round of knocking, and then the sound of her side-gate rattling open. Whoever it was must be coming to try again at the back door. Sensible people would take the lack of an answer as a sign that she was either not at home, or not at home to visitors. Therefore, the person who was making their way round the side of her house was not sensible. She wasn’t frightened, just annoyed. She had things to do. She didn’t have time to deal with non-sensible people.
She put the bowl carefully in the draining-rack, and then lay down on the floor. This was not because she was frightened; it was just quicker and more reliable than leaving the room to hide. Her living-room curtains were open, and if she tried to escape upstairs, there was a chance they would see her go past. A shadow passed across the kitchen window, paused. Her unwelcome guest must be peering in. Another sign that they were not someone she wanted to spend time talking to. Holding her breath, she rolled a little closer to the kitchen cabinets.
The knocking started again, this time on the back door. She was glad she’d chosen not to have glazing in it. If the door had glass in, the visitor would be able to see her lying on the floor, and while she didn’t especially mind what they might think of her hiding from visitors, she very much minded the idea that they might think she had fallen and hurt herself, and that their help was required. One more round of knocking, and then something else, something wilder and lower down, making the door shudder in its frame. There was no question about it. The stranger outside had kicked her door. As she stared in disbelief, it happened again. Then a flurry of pounding, as if the stranger was trying to beat her door into submission, and finally silence.
Lying on the floor, she considered her options. She could take a chance on being seen, creep out of the kitchen and into the hall, make her way to the stairs and watch developments from her bedroom. She could stay here on the kitchen floor and listen out for the sound of the gate. She could make her way to the phone, perhaps abandoning all pretence at concealment, and call the police. Or she could let her righteous outrage guide her, and go to the door and fling it open, ready to tear strips off whoever the disgustingly rude person was who was waiting for her outside.
The person was leaning against the wall, forehead pressed against the rough white pebbledash surface. After a moment’s perplexity (he looks like a teenager but I don’t know any teenagers why would a young lad be trying to beat my door down) she recognised him.
“I saved your life once,” she told him severely. “That doesn’t give you the right to behave like a moron. If I don’t answer the door it’s because I don’t want to talk to anybody.”
Jacob turned his face towards hers. There were red marks on his forehead that could have been from the pebbledash or could simply be the usual teenage acne, and his hair had been ruffled out of its careful shape by the salty lick of the wind. Despite his sudden arrival and wild appearance, he looked like the kind of boy who would grow up to be entirely average, the Styrofoam peanut of the classroom, soon to become replaceable workplace fodder for a mid-sized company with no real prospects, lacking Ella’s delicate prettiness and charm. It was only the expression in his eyes that made him stand out. It was familiar to her from the nights when she woke and sat up and then left the bed to peer into the mirror on her vanity table.
“Well, come on in then,” she said, and held the door open.
He slouched inside without speaking, and took the chair she pulled out for him without making eye contact. His demeanour had the appearance of rudeness but she suspected it was more the timidity of a lost animal who had no idea how to behave, and therefore took refuge in saying and doing nothing at all. Without speaking, she filled the kettle and took out the packet of biscuits. For his little sister she would arrange them prettily on a plate, alternating two different kinds so she could watch Ella pause and hesitate over which to choose first, but for Jacob she laid down the box and turned away to the kettle so he could eat unobserved. She listened for the sound of rustling and munching, but the only sound was the roiling of the water.
She poured hot water onto the teabags, stirred, squeezed, laid them to steam and cool on the teapot-shaped piece of china she had bought years ago in Scarborough for her own mother. Added milk and sugar to both mugs (for Ella she would elaborately consult on the exact volume and ratio of dilutable squash to cold water, but her brother could have tea, made the way she made it, and like it). When she sat down opposite him, Jacob was slumped sullenly inside his coat as if she’d forced him to be here, and for a moment she considered flinging open the back door and waiting for him to run for freedom; but then he looked at her again, that frantic desperate look that made her heart turn over, and instead she handed him the mug of tea and held his gaze, waiting for his defences to crumble and the words to pour out.
“Are you going to sit there like a bump on a log?” she said at last. “Or are you going to tell me what you’re doing here?”
“Ella used to come here,” Jacob muttered. “She said you gave her biscuits.”
“You didn’t come half a mile for a biscuit. But you can have one if you like.” She pushed the packet towards him. This week she’d chosen Jammie Dodgers, a biscuit she despised but imagined Ella might enjoy. Jacob took one from the packet and shoved it mechanically into his mouth, a single greedy bite that engulfed the biscuit and let loose a stormcloud of crumbs. “Or two, if you’re that hungry.” He took another, chewed it, swallowed with wh
at looked like an effort. His hands were trembling as they reached for his tea. “I lost another six feet of garden in the storm. How about you? Did you lose anything?”
She was only making conversation, but to her surprise these words seemed to unlock whatever force kept him still. He pushed the mug away, slopping tea out onto the wood, and stood up so violently his chair fell over. She wondered if he was going to hit her, but instead he turned and bent over the sink, as if he might be about to vomit. His shoulders shook and a thin high sound threaded out from between his lips.
“I can’t understand what you’re saying,” she said. She thought about going over to him, putting a hand on his shoulder, patting him for comfort, but he seemed too strange and too savage, and besides, she hadn’t asked to get involved with his problems. “If you want help, you’ll have to talk a bit more clearly.” The thin sound began to resolve itself into words. “That’s better, but not good enough. Try again.”
“I said,” he finally got out, “my mum’s left us.”
Good, she thought.
“These things do happen, you know,” she said out loud. “Especially these days. It’s not really anything to come crying to a stranger about, is it?” His expression made him look very young. “I don’t mind this time, but you have to admit it’s an odd way to behave.”
“Dad told me. He said she left three nights ago. In the middle of that storm.”
“Some people like a bit of drama.”
“And he’s spent every minute since then drinking.” The boy’s face, unremarkable in repose, became strikingly ugly when he let the terror show through. “He’s always drunk quite a lot but now he just goes on and on and I can’t make him stop.”
She’d known this too. It hadn’t been her problem then and it still wasn’t now.
“Give him time to get over it. He’ll settle down. People always do.” Jacob wasn’t listening to her. He was eyeing the biscuit packet like a hyaena. “You can have another biscuit if you like.”
He ate it in a single bite, and licked the crumbs from his fingers. Then he sat back down at the table and buried his nose in the mug of tea she’d made for him. Clearly he wasn’t going to leave any time soon. She sighed, and wondered what was the least amount of effort she could get away with making.
“I’m going upstairs to wash my hands,” she told him. “You can make yourself a sandwich if you like. And there’s soup in the cupboard. Make sure you rinse the tin before you put it in the recycling. And clean up after yourself.”
His gratitude was so open and needy that she couldn’t stand to be in the same room. When she had washed her hands, she sat in her bedroom and stared at the photograph of her husband that stared watchfully out at her from the bedside table.
“What should I do?” she asked it. Speaking to the photo-graph felt artificial and forced, as it always did. As the years went by it became increasingly hard to connect the man she had loved with the single frozen image who looked out at her, unchanged and un-aging, from within the gold-coloured frame. Nonetheless she felt obliged to try it from time to time. “There’s an angry hungry teenage boy I hardly know, who says his mother’s left and his father’s drunk all the time, sitting downstairs in our kitchen. What am I supposed to do about him?”
She waited. Listened to the rattle of wings as a pigeon took off from the gutter, and the small click of floorboards settling. Nothing came to her but a sense of embarrassment at talking out loud to a piece of printed paper shut away behind a sheet of glass. Her husband was not there. He would never be there. He was where he’d been for the last thirty years, resting peacefully on the soft brown floor of the North Sea. She would have to work this one out on her own.
Back in the kitchen, Jacob was standing over a saucepan of soup and devouring a sandwich loaded with what looked like half a pig’s worth of ham. Crumbs rained into the soup as he stirred it, but at least he’d wiped the worktop down, washed the knife and laid it to rest on the draining-board. That was a good sign. From the sounds of things, he’d need to get good at domestic tasks rather quickly if he wanted to stay alive. How much did he know already about cooking and cleaning and shopping on a budget? She wondered who would teach him now.
“Would you like some too?” he asked. His eyes were pink and swollen and his smile was watery.
“No thank you. I’ve already had mine. But you can make me another cup of tea, with milk and one sugar. Mine’s gone cold.”
She watched him as he moved about her kitchen – rinsing away the cold tea and then wiping the stains from the sink, guessing quickly where she stored the teabags, filling the kettle without splashing and only halfway. It was only tea, but it suggested someone who wasn’t completely clueless about how to behave in a domestic space. Perhaps the boy might survive after all. He added sugar to her mug but not to his own. She felt a glint of satisfaction that she had guessed wrong. She didn’t want to know any more about Jacob than she’d already been forced to.
“Don’t forget to stir the soup,” she reminded him as he was squeezing out the teabags. She’d chosen her moment deliberately to test him, but he dealt with it well, shuttling quickly between the two tasks of tea-making and soup-stirring, wiping up drips and splashes without having to be told. Something in his life had opened him up to the softer, more feminine skills of caring for people and things as if their welfare mattered enough to spend time over. He was pouring the soup into a bowl now, tipping the saucepan slowly to avoid splashes. Before he sat down to eat, he sluiced the pan out at the sink and then re-filled it to soak. The phrase that came to her mind was your mother’s taught you well; but she remembered the little she’d seen of Maggie, and wondered if the lesson had been learned not by copying his mother, but by compensating for her omissions. Or perhaps he’d learned from watching his father.
“So what do you actually want from me?” she asked, and picked up her mug of tea.
The question startled him; he stared at her for several seconds, a bead of soup gathering and threatening to spill.
“Nothing,” he said at last, and licked the soup furtively from his lips.
“If you want someone to talk to, I don’t mind listening just this once. But I don’t do sympathy very well.”
“She left me behind,” he said.
“She left in the middle of the night. What did you expect? That she was going to come and wake you up and hang around while you packed all your stuff?”
“She didn’t tell me she was going. She didn’t even leave me a note. She left my dad to tell me about it. How could she do that to me?”
The pained disbelief in his face was hard to look at. How foolish human beings were when they faced the first big hurt of their lives, imagining this was the worst pain anyone had ever endured, that this was the most life would ever demand of them. It made her angry to see how much emotion he was willing to expend on something so trivial.
“She was probably in a hurry.”
“But it’s like she didn’t even remember I existed.” His voice was petulant now, the words of a much smaller child coming out incongruously from a young man’s frame. “I mean, how could she do that? She’s supposed to love me.”
“Stop being so dramatic. There are far worse things that can happen than your parents splitting up.”
“Not when you’re my age there isn’t.”
“Yes, there is. She could be dead, for example. That would be much, much worse.” She saw him wince, and felt guilty. When would she learn that people who hadn’t yet been properly hurt had far less scar tissue to protect them? “For goodness sakes, Jacob, I didn’t mean she actually is dead. It’s just an example of how much worse things could be. Please don’t wipe your nose on your hand, it’s disgusting. Get a piece of kitchen roll to wipe it on. And wash your hands before you sit back down.”
He did as she said with the mechanical obedience of exhaustion. There were dark shadows under his swollen eyes. She wondered if he would expect her to invite him to stay the night.
“Now listen to me.” She thought about putting her hand over his, but decided she could get away without having to. “Your mother’s left your father. That’s a shame, but it happens. She probably wasn’t thinking about you when she left, but why should she? You’re not the centre of the universe. I’m sure she’ll get in touch with you when she’s ready.”
“My dad says she won’t be in touch ever. That’s about all he does say. He repeats the same thing over and over –”
“Your dad’s been drinking. People say things they don’t mean when they’re drinking.”
“No they don’t. People tell the truth when they’ve been drinking.”
“What makes you think you know better than me? He’s angry with your mum, that’s all. But he’ll get over it. And so will you. People can get over much worse things than that. And once that happens, you’ll be fine again.”
“She took Ella.”
“What?”
“She took Ella. Not me. Just Ella. I woke up and they were both gone.”
Ella, sitting in the spot where her older brother sat now, looking at her over the top of her glass of juice. That elfish face and soft hair. For a moment, before she reminded herself that this was nothing compared to the awful things that could have happened, she felt her heart toll in her chest like a bell.
“She didn’t wake me to say goodbye. She took Ella out of her bed in the middle of the night and left. Who even does that? Why did she take Ella and not me?”
A drop of water fell from the tap and struck the base of the sink with a hollow aluminium thud.
“There’s not much point asking me,” she said at last. “How would I know what was going through your mother’s head? I suppose you’re thinking it’s because Ella’s her favourite. Well, even if she has got a favourite, that doesn’t mean she doesn’t love you too. Be grateful for what you have.”
Underwater Breathing Page 22