Everything You Need

by A. L. Kennedy

“Well, my overalls are cleaner than my towels.” He handed the soap to Mary without her asking, startling her a little with its sudden give and slip. He rolled his eyes and stage-whispered in a moist lunge of breath, “Honestly, she’s such a tumshie.”

  “No, I’m not.”

  “Aye, you are, if I say so. Who’s the boss here, in any case?”

  “Me.”

  “The cheek of her—you were going to read me that next line—so on you go.”

  Sophie performed an elaborate sigh and looked down at her book for a moment before studying Nathan again. He turned to Mary, with a frown barely restraining an expression of unmistakable happiness. “Joe should be here any minute to fetch her home—there’ll be no more sense got out of her today. Not that she isn’t doing fine.”

  “You sound . . .” Mary let the water shiver her arms clean from her palms to her elbows and back.

  “Sound what?”

  “Scottish.” She was beginning to feel almost unbearably tired.

  “Well, I am. That’s where I was born.”

  She cupped the flow and held it to her lips, drank and then leaned against the sink, hands dripping. “A cat that’s born in an oven isn’t a cake. That’s . . . Uncle Morgan always said that.”

  “I come from a long line of cats. All born in ovens. Are you all right?”

  The light from the kitchen window needled at Mary’s temples, bruised her eyes.

  “Why doesn’t she dry herself, Nathan?”

  “Why don’t you mind your own business, Sophie?” Somewhere outside, Eckless barked a welcoming bark. “That’ll be Joe—you should go and meet him.”

  But Sophie was determined. “She’s got your overalls, why doesn’t she—?”

  “Oh, for goodness’ sake.” And Nathan took Mary’s wrists, swinging her a little towards him with surprising strength, and gently patted her hands against his chest. The cotton was soft from frequent washings, a dark blue darkening to black where the moisture coloured it, and behind it was the muscle of his body, its hard heat, the slightly unnatural movement of his inhalations. As usual, he smelt very vaguely of soap and, today, a trace of salt, but with nothing beyond that—no scent of his own, or no scent that she could notice, that was significantly different from her own.

  He sighed beneath her palms, his breath sweet with biscuit, and the heaviness at the back of her skull billowed up in reply and unsteadied her.

  “And her face. She has to dry her face.” Sophie slithered down from her chair, then ran to Nathan and hugged his legs as he loosed his hold on Mary’s hands and then tucked one arm at the small of her back and drew her the necessary inches in. For the first time since they’d fought in the kitchen they made a kind of embrace.

  “And her face.” Sophie fumbled their knees together, enthusiastically.

  Mary found herself quite malleable, foggily willing to have Nathan’s hand rub her neck, nudge her until her cheek was firm against his sternum, his soft resilience under cloth. Her breathing scrambled, climbed, started to beat in a way which meant she must be crying, although she only felt exhausted, not sad.

  “Aahm . . .” Nathan swayed a little, his palm setting a quiver of pressure against her neck. Eckless clattered in across the boards, and what must have been Joe’s footfalls closed towards them gently, slowed, paused. There was a tautening in Nathan’s spine, where, Mary realised, she was now holding him, hugging him back.

  “No. Not yet. I don’t want to go yet.” Sophie’s clasp was eased away from them.

  “Ssssh.” Joe was tactfully determined.

  “OK.” She released them. “Bye, Nathan. Bye, Mary. Bye.”

  Sophie’s farewells receded as Joe left the cottage with her, absenting himself as quietly as he’d come. And perhaps Nathan smiled goodbye to them both over Mary’s shoulder, or exchanged significant glances, or winked, or perhaps he had his eyes closed the way she did, she couldn’t tell. She heard Eckless slump, huff and settle for a doze.

  Nathan cleared his throat. “They’ve gone.”

  Mary slipped her hands from him and began to step away. His arm twitched in around her waist, “Which is . . . no . . . but that doesn’t mean,” and then released. “Unless you want to—of course—want to stop, or . . . do you want to, to . . . Tea? In case of emergency, make tea. Ha. Yes.”

  She was cold where each of his different pressures had lifted and gone.

  “You should sit, Mary. Shouldn’t you sit? Or lie? There’s the sofa . . . Are you not well? What’s wrong?”

  Questions. He can’t help it, can he? He always has to ask. Except he means them now.

  He was craning his left hand to scratch his right ear and wincing with concern.

  But I can’t tell him. Not something that’s so . . . when I think of . . . I shouldn’t have come.

  Nathan rushed water into the kettle, splashing his legs. “Oh, for fu—. It seems I’m not intended to be dry at any point today.” He showed her a little grin. “Look, you go through to the other room, have a seat and we can finish the biscuits. That’s one of the good things about Sophie—she makes me get biscuits in. I don’t have them otherwise, because I just eat them.”

  “Well, that’s what they’re for.”

  His grin repeated, warmed. “Nobody loves a smart-arse—away in and sit down.”

  Once Mary had told him what had happened Nathan waited, folded his arms and waited.

  Easy, easy.

  Closed his arms and waited.

  Nothing hasty—blow this and you fucking blow the lot.

  She came to me. Told me.

  Maybe everyone else was out.

  He rubbed one eyebrow and noticed that it was shedding hairs—quite a lot of hairs. Just what he wanted—to go bald in the eyebrows while she watched.

  Fucking concentrate, come on.

  That stupidfuckingbastardfucking—Jesus Christ, what kind of an arsehole psycho is that bitch? To do that? To do that to my fucking daughter? To make her look at that.

  Be calm, be calm.

  Fuck, I worry about the boys on the quay in Ancw, the way they look at her, just look. Never mind when I see people hugging her. Trustworthy people in the Fellowship, hugging her.

  I mean, even me hugging her, for Christ’s sake, is slightly, slightly a worry, because of how I should try to do it—not knowing the right way—because of her not knowing who I am, because she really shouldn’t trust people who are men and not her father and because she thinks that I am a man and not her father and it’s . . . too difficult.

  But women—bloody women dropping their kit and flashing their bastard piercings, I hadn’t even begun to worry about that . . . Jesus—that’s the kind of thing to make her go away.

  Shit.

  Lynda, you cunt, you com-plete cunt.

  “You’re . . .”

  Mary jerked him out of his private rant, nodding to his hand: the way it was fixed around hers in what must have become—quite a while ago—a painfully tightened grip.

  “Oh, shit—sorry. Sorry. I was thinking.”

  Look at it, you’ve left marks, even. Good God, you shouldn’t be allowed out on your own. She’ll leave, she’ll go away back to Capel Whatever and it will be your fault—playing at Daddies with someone else’s kid, instead of paying attention to what might be happening, keeping an eye out, taking care—you fucking fuckwit.

  He felt his saliva thickening, somehow, making it difficult to talk. “I am sorry. I’ve hurt you. Are you all right, though?”

  “Yes—you just got a bit firm, there, for a while.”

  “No, I mean with the . . . Lynda thing. It hasn’t made you want to . . . You are safe here. Lynda, she’s . . . she won’t have intended to upset you.”

  “She didn’t.”

  “Oh, well, that’s . . . good.”

  But you want her upset, don’t you? Falling back into your arms again, patently alive and there and needing you again? Someone who’ll let you save them. Someone to stop your fucking eyebrows falling out.
<
br />   And you’re calling Lynda a psycho.

  “It was just all very . . .”

  “Strange?”

  “Yes, strange.”

  Nathan felt his heart rattle with satisfaction.

  Congratulations. She agreed to your end for her sentence. Big sodding deal.

  The rattle stilled and somewhere near the root of his tongue he caught a rising sourness. He punched, inappropriately but gently, at her shoulder and found it difficult to control his vocabulary.

  “I’ll, um . . . This has . . . You’re all right?”

  “Yes. Now.” And she did look much better, less pale—she was made of resilient stuff.

  Shame it doesn’t run in the family.

  She faced him, eyes a calm, sugary brown with movements of copper and gold to tug him in. Maura, in their beginning, could look at him through just the same colours and tourniquet his every thought to a throbbing stop. She blinked. “Is there anything we should do? For her?”

  “Um?” The walls seemed to shutter in at him, then skip back. He could smell a perfume that he hadn’t met in years.

  “For Lynda.”

  “That’s something, something—look, I’m a bit—ah—angry about this, so I’m . . . I’m going to step outside.” He snapped to his feet and immediately regretted it, a watery sweat blooming on his face and hands. “Yes. Right. But don’t go. Yet.”

  I can make it, I can make it, I can make it.

  And he did—he made it outside.

  Oh, God.

  Where he proceeded to throw up.

  Oh, God.

  Two custard creams and one digestive biscuit, one sandwich of (tinned) ham and (baked by Ruth) brown bread.

  Oh, God.

  He crouched in the shadow of his house and let nausea press him empty until he could only shiver and cough—keeping things as quiet as he could.

  Oh, God, Maura. Dear God.

  Back in the kitchen, he sluiced over his neck with water and swilled out his mouth.

  “Better?” Having slipped in at his back, unnoticed, Mary brushed his shoulders with her hands and shrapnelled him through with the thought of himself as an altogether different man: someone domestic, cared for, caring, gentle-minded.

  In your fucking dreams, you sad, old git.

  His eyebrow twitched. “Yes, I’m fine. I went for a—” He was going to suggest that he’d been for a run round his only available block in a manly exorcism of righteous rage: but he knew it would be plain to both of them he was lying, so he settled for, “Yes, I’m fine.”

  “You should look after yourself.”

  “I do.”

  She smiled at him, forced him into a yelp of justification. “No, really, I do.”

  “Well, I’m going home now.”

  “You’re—”

  What?

  I knew it, she’s going, she’s fucking going. She’s leaving me.

  Shit.

  “Back to my bunker.” She pointed to the Nissen hut and Nathan shut his eyes for a moment as his panic shook and then dropped him, stalked away.

  “Good, good. I mean, not good that you’re going, but good that you can, that you feel able . . . But if you’re disturbed in any way, at any point . . .”

  “I know where to come.”

  You do, you do, you do.

  And we can both have another therapeutic hug.

  Women are lucky, they’re small—smaller. We grow. We lose the possibility of being embraced and feeling, properly feeling that we are cared for, surrounded by another’s care. We get alone.

  Shite.

  Tell her that and she’ll start to realise how truly unwell you are.

  “Oh, yes, absolutely. I know where to come.” She glanced out at the grass, now mainly in the shade of a long dusk. “But if Joe’s out, I can always come to you.”

  Nathan produced an especially ugly whinny of laughter before he could stop himself. People were only cheeky when they felt secure—so she must feel secure and that was good.

  “Well,” his voice sounded as if he was smiling, smiling far too much— then again, she was smiling, too, “if I’ve got nothing better to do, I might let you in. Meanwhile, you might want to get your finger out and slip me a manuscript. Or two.”

  Is that the right tone, the nurturing tone, the supportive one? Fuck.

  “I am trying.”

  “Oh, I know. I’m sure. I’m not hurrying. Just teasing. In fact.”

  Bearing in mind that if you’re teasing but you have to explain it, then you’re not teasing, you’re just ballsing things up and being a fucking thug.

  He tried a more sincere approach: because that’s what he was, for goodness’ sake, sincerely sincere. “But I would really like it, if you’d give me a piece to read. I like reading. Now and then.”

  “Soon. I am trying. Soon.” She began stepping out into the evening, into the smell of relaxing vegetation, a somnolent sea. “Soon.”

  “And you’re sure you’re all right?”

  She turned and, over her shoulder, as casual as you like, and he did like, she called, “Yes, fine. And you’re all right?”

  “I’m all right, yes. I’m all right.”

  Yes.

  For two weeks out of every year, a funfair would set up in Ancw— just along from the quay. On the island they would hear it in the evenings, waltzing and screaming up into blurry life—all nauseous lights and unlikely fortunes and rolls full of mysterious, scalding meat. Nathan found himself—at this distance—rather fond of the whole sad, fraudulent and shoddy swing of it.

  Like the Lammas Fair—except that was autumn, probably autumn, always bloody raining, anyway—strings of little, pearly white light bulbs gusting in and out of focus through the mist—the stink of burnt onion smoke and diesel and wet wool—and seeing what I could knock . . . the best . . . I think my best theft was that pocket knife with a Highland soldier’s picture on each side—it slipped in the palm of your hand, just as easily as your thumb—made for the taking.

  And then I felt guilty about it for weeks, couldn’t use the fucking thing. In the end I buried it somewhere, I think . . . can’t remember. I can only clearly recall the guilt. I knew I’d have to pay for it, that’s the thing, I knew I’d eventually have to cough up the going moral rate for all of my sticky, shitty, prickly sins: even the ones I hadn’t liked. I knew it. I just wasn’t sure of when.

  If religion was good for anything, it would tell you: never do a bad thing when you’re young, because God has no intention of sending you to hell, he will just wait—as you may have suspected—to fuck you around for the raw entirety of your adult bloody life. Petty theft, kicking, deceit and petulant wanking: enjoy them while you can: the fee will be desolation, middle-aged foolishness, getting your prick into just enough cunt to miss it, crave it, howl for it in each of your clammy dreams until senility finally pisses out your fire. Put that in the Bible and you’ll catch everybody’s attention—and fuck who begat who.

  Fucksake, stop whingeing. You’ve got the girl here, haven’t you? You’re with your daughter. And you never thought you would be. Well, did you?

  Mm hm. Miracles happen. Ha ha ha.

  Shut up and enjoy it. I mean, things are going fine, finer than they have in ages. Be reasonable, man.

  He kneaded his scalp and then webbed his fingers behind his neck, flattened his pillow, threw off his sheet.

  Why? Nothing else is reasonable, why should I be?

  The signs weren’t good. He’d already lost his sense of humour and it probably wasn’t even midnight yet. It made a kind of sense—he was tired enough to feel more than a fraction unhinged—overdoing it lately. Under cooler circumstances, he’d be deep in his preferred condition: unconsciousness. But tonight the humidity was broiling him awake every time he dozed and, if he couldn’t actually sleep, then he had to think. And the last thing he should do while unattended in a darkened room was think. Unless his mind could be deflected, be persuaded to soften its edge until exhaustion finally came a
nd smothered him.

  Mary’s looking well.

  Good start.

  Looking like Maura.

  Sssh.

  The way Maura was.

  Sssh.

  The one I can see looks so much like the one I can’t. Oh, Christ.

  A salt choke welled in his lung. He made a studiously courteous effort to negotiate the threat away.

  Please now, that’s enough. Please.

  I always know I’m fucked when I get polite.

  But, even so, let’s give it a rest. Tears after bedtime—that’s not what we want.

  Fuck, I sound like a district nurse.

  Look, just get yourself sorted. If you wanted to see Maura, it wouldn’t take you long to work out how. Well, would it?

  But I thought that she would have wanted to see me. I thought she’d hear, that she’d find out where Mary was going, who she’d be with when she got here, and then, surely to God, she’d have . . . Anyone else would have tried, would have made the effort to get in touch. A message. Just a fucking note, even. Anything.

  Christ, she’s a cunt.

  Using the daughter as bait for the mother. You haven’t a moral muscle in your body, have you? Hm? So who’s the cunt now?

  He turned on his stomach, mashed his face to the mattress, forgetting that the motion would mean his mouth had, inadvertently, to make a kiss. He forced his brain to shout the first words of any comfort it came across.

  MARY LIKES ME.

  And I like her.

  Love her.

  Love.

  The bleak imbalance of this equation plummeted in him, left him with the tearing sensation of having landed badly inside his own skin.

  And then, in a moment’s incaution, he remembered, like a sweet, lancing flare, Maura’s hottest smile. He twitched against the ghost—not this, not now—of the first, magnificent time she pushed her lovely, slipperied middle finger in all the way to her final knuckle up his grateful, astonished, grateful, grateful arse. He relived the shudder of his thighs: the bowstring slap of lust from the base of his spine to his neck: the blush of penetrated, tensing sweat: his whimper at her cheek.

  God help me.

  Not that He will.

  Rolling again, he reached for his water glass and poured out its tepid contents across his shoulders and chest—jolt himself out of it.