The Race

by Nina Allan

  I hated cleaning the drains, because you never knew what might turn up there. Mostly it was just stray sheets of newspaper and the odd supermarket carrier bag, bloated to three times its usual size with mud and water. When Derek was younger and Mum was still able to make him help me with the yard cleaning he would pull the bags out of the drains and hurl them at me. I used to pretend I thought it was funny, because if I yelled at him to stop that would only make him do it all the more. The bags mostly landed on the concrete anyway, bursting and releasing their watery, shit-coloured contents back into the yard.

  I began shovelling the pile of rubbish into one of the bin sacks. There were snails on some of the leaves, glistening and conker-coloured. I picked off every one I could find, placing them carefully into the space between the back of the shed and the garden wall, a mossy crevasse, snail paradise. I watched one as it gained purchase on the brick, its feelers nudging the air as it inched upward.

  I hoped it would be safe there. It bothered me that there were so many and that every time it rained there were always more. I knew I couldn’t be expected to save them all but I still got upset when I thought of them trapped in the rubbish sacks, the idea was horrible. I slid backwards out of the gap, my foot sliding on a soft, slippery object at the base of the wall. I bent down to pick it up, expecting to find another of the rain-filled carrier bags, a waterlogged bread bag maybe. It slipped wetly between my fingers as whatever was inside slithered slowly towards one end like pieces of rotten meat inside an out-of-date freezer bag. It was heavier than it looked, and the stink was sickening. I realised it was something awful, something dead. I dropped it at once. It slumped to the ground with a nasty little squelch that made me think of dog turds, although I knew this wasn’t a dog turd because the smell was different.

  I stooped closer to examine it, a flesh-coloured sac, pinkish-grey, with a bloody ragged opening in one end. I snapped off a twig and poked at it, turning it over. It was only then that I saw what it was – a dead rat, rotted away inside and partially eaten. It had been there for weeks, most likely. I prodded it again with the stick, trying to force it back behind the shed. A cat had probably got it. There were many cats in our vicinity, massive, half-feral tabbies that slipped in and out of the shadows like the ghosts of the pampered housecats they once had been.

  In the summer you could hear them all night, fucking and fighting and killing rats until the first light of dawn.

  The cats fascinated Derek for some reason, and over the long, scorching weeks of that last summer before Mum went we developed a craze for cat-watching. We used a step ladder to climb up on to the roof of one of the sheds, from where we enjoyed a bird’s-eye view over all the straggling back gardens of Laton Road. The night air lay soft and heavy on us, like a blanket, and through the shallow, purplish half-darkness of mid-July and early August we would spy on the cats as they prowled the overgrown back alleyways on the lookout for rats or escaped hamsters or whatever was going.

  “Look at them, they’re like bent coppers,” Derek said. It was too hot to sleep. We hauled rugs and cushions up on to the shed roof and made a kind of den there. We called it moon camping. It was often only as it began to get light that we finally fell asleep for an hour or two.

  The hours between four and six are the hours of enchantment. The world emerges from its dark time and begins to feel okay again. It’s easy to believe then. In gods or alien races, in fairy folk or monsters. In anything.

  I tied the bin bags closed and hauled them over into the corner by the outside tap. The yard looked grey and empty now, stripped of colour. As I carried the first two sacks down the side passageway to where the dustbins were kept I heard the rumbling of an engine out the front. It was the weekend, so there were fewer cars about and the sound seemed louder than normal in the Sunday stillness. I stopped what I was doing, letting the rubbish sacks slide down to rest on the ground either side of my feet. I pressed my face up against the side gate, which had a broken slat in the centre that you could peer through.

  What I saw was my mother, climbing into the back seat of a waiting taxi. She had her winter coat on, for some reason, burgundy red like her dressing gown but with a black velvet collar. Her yellow hair had been combed back into a pony tail.

  She was carrying a green leather holdall, something she’d picked up for a fiver on Kemptown market and that I knew she loved.

  Just before she closed the taxi door she looked back at the house. At the time I believed it was me she was looking at, that she knew somehow that I was there, watching her from behind the gate. Later I began to think I had imagined it. Then she slammed the taxi door shut and the cab drove away.

  I finished loading the bin bags into the dustbins and then went back inside. I ran straight upstairs to my room. I was shivering again, even harder than before, even though the central heating had been switched on since I’d been outside and the house was now warm. My brother’s door was closed, vibrating gently to the sound of some CD or other. There was no sign of my father, but on Sundays it was rare for him to appear before midday.

  I sat down on my bed, hugging my knees and staring at the books in the bookcase as if the words on their spines contained a coded message I had to decipher. The room felt like it was in abeyance, holding its breath.

  I held my breath with it. I don’t know how, but I knew my mother wasn’t coming back. My room looked the same as before, but the world beyond it had changed for good.

  ~*~

  With Mum gone the place went downhill pretty quickly. We lived of frozen fish fingers and tins of ravioli, stuff my father brought home in bulk from the cash-and-carry. Dirty dishes piled up in the sink until one or other of us got sick of it and did a mass washing up. None of us mentioned Mum leaving or where she might be. It was as if we were trying to pretend to one another that it hadn’t happened. I kept hoping that there might be a sign from her, and jumped every time the phone rang or the doorbell went, but it was never her and as the weeks of her absence began to mount up even the idea of her began to seem less real.

  The not-knowing made a sound inside my head like the wind gusting at speed along an empty alleyway, and opened a queasy emptiness inside me, the fear that I was about to lose my balance, the same way I had when I was ten and suffered an infection of the inner ear. I was off school for weeks. In the end a lot of black stuff came out of my ear and after that I started to feel better. Mum grumbled all the time I was ill. She bought me magazines to read, with film stars in them and recipes for chicken fricassee. Her hair stuck out like tumbleweed. She used wide-toothed tortoiseshell hair slides to hold it back.

  I kept dreaming about her, even when she was actually there in the room with me. I dreamed she was still a woman but not my mother. When I woke up I stared at her closely, trying to work out if the dream had been real or not, but I could never decide. My mother grew up in Croydon, in a chaotic, rambling house full of rescue greyhounds and sheet music. Her mother taught violin at one of the private schools in the near vicinity. Her father was a lawyer of some kind. He hired my father to clear some furniture, a kitchen dresser and a mahogany wardrobe they’d recently inherited but didn’t have room for.

  Mum was seventeen. She once told me the only reason she agreed to go on a date with my dad when he asked her was because she knew her father would go berserk when he found out.

  “I’m not angry with you,” she said to me during that period of my illness. She held my hair back with both hands, as if she was trying to see my face better, trying to secure a clearer memory of what I looked like. “It’s just the whole bloody thing, you know?”

  Her name was Marcia, said like Marsha, which I thought was pretty. It was as if she was always trying to remind me she wasn’t mine to keep.

  Without Marcia inside it the house felt like a shell, the shell of one of the large, glistening candystriped snails in the yard, for instance, the animal inside consumed by some malevolent parasite. It scared me sometimes, just to be there. My mother never liked
the Laton Road house. Now that she was gone the dust and broken camcorders and boxes of old newspapers were free to take over.

  Once something is broken it changes its nature. There was an old radio in the living room that Dad was always saying he’d fix but never did. I don’t know if he even knew how. It was square and heavy, and looked like the radios you sometimes see in old war films, with everyone gathered round listening to one of those noisy speeches by Hitler or Churchill. It was made of Bakelite, which I knew was a kind of plastic. I liked the smell of it, the way you could open up the back with a small brass catch and see the wires inside.

  It didn’t work though. Just sat there on the sideboard, gathering dust. Soon there was enough dust to write your name in, and then more dust over that. The dust seemed to me to be a sign that the thing was dead.

  I hated those dusty dead things that were suddenly everywhere. I wanted to be free of them, but the act of simply dusting them seemed too small to make a difference. I kept my own room tidy and clean, but on the landing and in the rooms downstairs the broken rubbish multiplied and grew dustier by the day.

  If you look at a broken camcorder for long enough, its original purpose begins to seem obscure. Run your fingers over the moulded black plastic, the exposed lens, clouded now with dust, like a wide, dead eye. There’s a maker’s name on the handle but you’ve never heard of them, and it’s hard to believe that an object with so little life in it ever did anything. It’s an exhausted artefact, a proof of something maybe, but you don’t know what of. You wonder if what you’re holding in your hand has floated up from the past, or arrived here from the future or from somewhere else.

  When you look at it lying on a rubbish dump with other broken things you feel a deep sadness. Almost as if the world that ever thought to produce such a thing – your own world – has outlived its usefulness.

  School was the only thing that stayed the same. This felt strange to me at first, because everyone there kept talking about things that no longer mattered to me. It was as if my life had slipped and fallen through a crack in time or something, or else the school had, I wasn’t sure which. Whole days would go by and I was unable to remember a single thing that happened in them. Gradually this changed. I started to feel safer at school than I did at home, because it was easier to predict what might happen there. I liked the identical shape of each day, the way people and objects fitted neatly into patterns. Like the cobalt-blue exercise books, stacked one on top of the other on the teacher’s desk at the front of the class. The pink lines of feint, the particular smell those books had, like new chalk.

  I even liked the headmistress, Miss Wisbech. She dressed plainly and sensibly like most of the other teachers, except for her glasses, which were by Dolce & Gabana. The glasses suited her, actually. In some odd way they were her. It was impossible to imagine her without them.

  In the November after Mum left, Miss Wisbech stopped me in the corridor and asked me to go with her to her office.

  “Is it true what I’ve heard?” she said. “That your mother is no longer living with you at home?”

  Her office was steeped in files. There was a large photograph on her desk, a kid of about five with curly hair and clutching a model steam engine, one of the posh metal kind, Hornby probably. I knew about Hornby railway sets from Derek.

  “She died,” I said. The words were out before I could stop them. They waved themselves jauntily in my face, like little red flags.

  “Oh,” said Miss Wisbech. There was a long silence. I looked down at my feet, not daring to catch her eye in case it made me come out with something even more messed up. I could feel myself blushing with shame, but even so I didn’t regret the lie I’d told. I knew it was the only thing I could have said that would stop Miss Wisbech or anyone else from asking questions.

  The carpet in Miss Wisbech’s office was dark green. It was speckled with bits of white, the tiny discs of paper you find packed inside the chest cavity of a hole punch. I drew mental lines between them, forming a random pattern of join-the-dots.

  “Do you need any help, Christy?” she said at last. “Any help at all?”

  I shook my head silently. I wondered what would happen if I told her about the broken radio, the way the dust kept covering up the other dust on the fogged-over dial.

  She let me go. I was late for maths, but only by five minutes.

  ~*~

  Derek started going out on the van with Dad when he was eight. By the time he was fifteen, he was working in the house clearance business full time.

  Mum wanted Derek to go to university. The rows about Derek’s future went on for hours – usually they finished with Mum in tears. In the end – just before she left, this was – the school sent her a letter saying that Derek had been classified as ‘ungovernable’ and they had ‘regretfully come to a decision’ to exclude him permanently.

  Derek blu-tacked the letter to his bedroom wall. When eventually it fell down he threw it away.

  Derek took to the business straight away. Partly it was the sense of freedom – driving around in the van all day, with no two days ever the same and always that feeling of something new happening. But he also had a genuine liking for old things. He handled objects carefully and with precision, and sometimes if you went out on the van with him he’d tell you about them. He was fascinated by the interiors of old houses and by what you could find there. He ended up knowing more about antiques than Dad, and Dad had been in the business practically from when he was in kindergarten.

  There was a picture Derek kept in his room for a while, an old oil painting of a woman leaning on a veranda rail. The woman in the painting looked just like Derek’s girlfriend Monica. The day after Monica dumped him, Derek took the picture outside into the yard and kicked it to pieces with his Doc Martens. For ages afterwards there were tiny shining patches all over the concrete, flecks of gold colour from the smashed picture frame.

  Sometimes, if he felt like it, Derek would take me with him when he went to price up a job. I enjoyed those drives. It was good to get out of the house, to see other places. In the week after the Christmas of the first year – no Christmas card from Mum, no nothing – Dad and Derek were booked to do a house clearance on West Hill Road in St Leonards. Derek had been given the keys in advance, because the property was empty and there would be no one there to let them in on the morning of the job. It was a massive job, Derek said, seventeen rooms in total. When he asked me if I wanted to go and have a look at the house with him I said all right.

  We drove there along the sea front. The tide was in, and even though the temperatures were close to freezing there were still windsurfers out.

  “Morons,” Derek said. “In this weather? I hope they drown themselves.”

  The sea was clear green, softly ruffled with mother-of-pearl, like antique jade. The surfers were ploughing through it, whipping the surface into whiteness, like the froth you see on top of a glass of champagne. I had tasted champagne only once, at a party for my mother’s aunt who had just died. I found it strange that any family would hold a party for a dead person, but Mum explained that her Aunt Louise had been an actress on the London stage.

  “She was quite famous, in her day,” Mum said. “This is what she would have wanted.”

  Mum was wearing a dress made from pale blue silk. There were tiny beads of glitter all over it, like pinpricks of light. Later, once she’d had a glass or two of the champagne, Mum told me that the blue dress was one of Aunt Louise’s.

  “I snuck upstairs and pinched it,” she said. The alcohol on her breath had the same sour smell as stinging nettles. “Right after the funeral. Aren’t I a riot?”

  She raised her glass to me and giggled. She looked like she was made of glass herself, tall and bright and gleaming, exquisitely fragile. I never saw her like it, before or since.

  West Hill Road is on the Bexhill side of St Leonards. It runs along the top of the cliff, behind the large, ship-shaped apartment block called Marine Court and above the road
that runs along the sea front called the Marina. The house we were going to see was called Charlotte House. It stood on the south side of West Hill Road, close to the cliff edge and with nothing between it and the English Channel but empty air. There was a car park at the back, half overgrown with brambles and with notices that said ‘keep out’ and ‘unauthorised vehicles are liable to clamping’. The building itself was massive, with steep red gables and a long veranda, the kind of oversized Victorian villa my father always referred to as a white elephant. Charlotte House used to be a hotel in the old days, then a nursing home. Eventually it became too expensive to run and so the owners closed it down and boarded it up.

  “It’s just the top floor we’re doing,” Derek said. “The rest is empty already, apparently.”

  He parked the van in the car park. He didn’t seem nervous about being clamped, so I supposed we were authorized. The sight of the house gave me goosebumps, because it was so large, probably.

  “Are you sure it’s okay to go in?” I said.

  “Of course. It’s a job, isn’t it?” He took the keys out of the ignition. “Let’s go.”

  The entrance to the fourth floor flat was through a side door.

  “Belonged to the caretaker,” Derek said. “Gone gaga, probably. Either that or he can’t manage the stairs any more.”

  The stairs were very steep, and uncarpeted. I wondered about the old man and where he was now. It made me sad to think of him being taken away. The stairwell was a dark and dingy green, lit by a single overhead bulb that somehow had to do for the entire hallway.