Martha felt struck. What Nancy had done bore no comparison with her own situation. She could have reminded her sister that she, the younger sister, had been the one left to deal with their mother’s death; the shock, the police, the unanswerable letters; the one who, at seventeen, had arranged a funeral and dealt with the legal mess while Sarah had sat tight in Australia, finalising her fucking wedding plans. But what was the point? Sarah had gone native. She swore all the time. All she knew was how to get on a high horse and ride into the distance.
Yes, Martha said. Thank god mum killed herself. Thank god for family.
Martha heard one of her nieces wailing in the background, needing attention. Sarah just held the line for a full thirty seconds. Then the voice creaked back down the line, dark, deliberate.
One thing, Martha. You’re still a bitch.
The flat had white walls, a spare room and a fridge that made rock-fall noises at random intervals. Martha woke a lot in the night but that was to be expected. It was adjustment. She cried at the ceiling on and off for two days, then asked for tranquillisers from the new GP who asked very few questions. She needed full time work to be occupied, and better useful, so supply was the obvious choice. High demand, nothing local, nothing permanent, nothing personal. No one paid much attention to who filled for a teacher off sick and not much attention was exactly what Martha wanted: no questions about family, what she did on weekends, just gratitude she had turned up at all. Supply was perfect.
From Peter’s very first weekend with her, he brought photographs: Riley’s idea. There was Peter sitting on a rug she did not recognise; eating breakfast from a familiar plate, but playing with an unfamiliar kitten on the old kitchen floor; reflected in the bedroom mirror, showing off his new school tie. Riley was showing he could fill the gap. They were good pictures, but curiously disquieting, and questions – does the kitten have a name? are those your new shoes? – irritated Peter enough for her to ask fewer as the months progressed. Riley did not phone. He needed the break to be clean, he said, to get his head around things. He hoped she would give him that. Martha understood. She understood completely.
After nine months, Riley had his head around all he needed. A hand-written letter, complete with a brochure of a trim little school and a photo of Martha’s mother-in-law watering fruit bushes in her garden, said he wanted very much to go back to Canada. Peter would love having his grandmother there all day, the wide open spaces. Unless Martha wished to raise an application for sole custody, he hoped she would meet and talk it through, hear what he had to say. This was his new voice for her, between formal and informal. It was optimistic. It was strong. The terrible surge of tenderness and loss that rushed upon her at its close, at her husband’s signature written more legibly that she’d ever seen it before, made her sit for a moment, compose herself, pour a drink. Surely he did not think she would object. She had put the most valuable thing in her life in his care already. That was the point. It was for her to adjust, Riley to do all the right things. Because he would. He always had. Her job now was not being difficult, or getting in the way.
She waited till evening before calling, then couldn’t speak. He waited. Eventually, she read the important thing she had to say from the card she had written out before dialling, just in case. He was grateful. He hoped it would be a relief, in time; a way for her to have space. If she wanted to write, he would pass her letters on. His mother, he said, asked after her kindly. There was a catch in his throat for a moment, then a more familiar tone, the Riley she had lived with, came down the line.
I wish you could see the school, the voice said. They’ve got a jazz band, a mountain survival team, British-style soccer. And there’s some kind of whizz-kid Art teacher who – then he was silent. He was silent so long Martha thought he had gone. Eventually, the line crackled.
Well. It’s a good place, he said. You get the picture.
The line was breaking up again. Not sure he could hear her, Martha said yes. Yes, she said, I do. Her words seemed to vanish into white noise.
Whatever’s best, she shouted. Ellen is a wonderful woman.
Then Riley knew that already. It was a stupid thing to say.
Whatever you think, she called, hearing only an echo of herself. I know you’ll do the right thing.
When all hope of Riley’s voice resurfacing disappeared completely, she hung up.
For his last visit, Peter brought a drawing – a house in the woods with a wolf outside, the forwarding address and phone number in Riley’s handwriting. Riley had used a ruler under his writing to keep it controlled, so the words were flat-bottomed, like little boats. Martha kept the visit routine; shared TV with a picnic on the rug, the park to see squirrels, colouring, what-if games. What if we could live on an island cropped up, stayed safe. They’d find animals, Peter said, make friends. Routine things, Peter off-guard, was what she wanted to remember. They watched a plane cross the clouds from the kitchen window, but he did not raise the subject of leaving. Provoking him to reveal his feelings, whatever they were, seemed crass. It mattered not to load Peter with emotions he didn’t need, namely hers. For now, there he was, in the kitchen. She wished only to seize the moment, to drink him in.
After, she put the drawing with some family snaps, a left-behind jumper, and sketches her son had made in a shoe box. She fished out a file of legal, household and financial stuff, not all of which she clearly understood, and set it alongside. Last, she foraged what Riley had always called that fucking casket – a black jewellery case, light enough to pass for empty – from the bottom of the wardrobe and settled it beside the rest. Her life – proofs of ownership, property, existence – done, dusted and not much when it came down to it. The half-bottle bottle of cheap malt she had bought for emergencies (her mother’s phrase) when she first moved in seemed justified. Tomorrow, she’d clear up, lock the papers away – in the airing cupboard maybe, beneath the bed. But not tonight. She couldn’t do it tonight. Tonight was for sitting on the carpet beside inanimate objects, pouring till the bottle stopped delivering.
In the early hours, knees creaky, she wandered to the kitchen. The motorway lights made bright clusters. All day and all night, cars travelled this road. People went about their business with no let-up, driving. It was what people did. Sour fumes rose from the glass, nipping at her eyes. Peter was out of harm’s way. She could not touch him, perhaps, but he was free from danger, open to joy. All she had to do was bear it. I’m here, she said, watching the words fog on the window pane. And so she was. Still here. She stood till morning, forehead pressed against the window, watching cars on the slip road veering sharply for the fun of it, taking corners way too fast.
Martha wrote to Peter once a week, a recitation of school stuff, animal stories, fragments of silly conversations she had overheard. When he wanted, Peter wrote back. He developed a wild flourish under his name, more even handwriting, a talent for cartooning. Now and then, Riley enclosed a snap in which she could see her son’s face changing; his hair turning longer, darker, blurring out his eyes. Insomnia apart, her own new life continued without much to remark upon. Supply teaching was steady and largely self-directed. She took poems into Chemistry classrooms, conducted debates on animal welfare in Physics, played Philip Glass in Maths and bet they couldn’t count the notes when left no other instructions. Few asked what she had done. They expected her to be on the sidelines. On one occasion, a shy Religious Studies teacher invited her on a field trip – an unrepeated adventure. On another, she joined a fourth-year trip to see Romeo and Juliet, astonished by the level of ready embarrassment sixteen-year-olds could muster. She was not part of the natural catchment for Retirement Dos and Nights Out. She went alone to concerts, leaving early if the music seeped too far beneath her skin. She experimented with photography, Modern Architecture and Ancient Greek at night-school till there was no space left in the week and she realised she preferred to be alone.
By Peter’s twelfth birthday, the le
tters arrived once or twice a year: hers went weekly, as before. Afraid of email, horrified by the overfamiliarity of social media, she stuck with pen and paper, guessed his tolerance for it was fading. He was still recognisable from the pictures Riley sent on, had the makings of solid shoulders, astonishingly white North American teeth. That Riley accepted the money she still sent by wire made her grateful. What else did she have to give? Now and then, she wondered how she would respond if asked to visit, but no invitation came.
On her fortieth, the small group who shared her lunchtime crossword surprised her. In tentative party mode, they cracked open a bottle of something fizzy and Grace from Home Economics made tray bakes. Fifteen more years and you can do what you like, she said, raising her glass for the toast. People made jokes about their ambition to be a former teacher one day. The age where life began, they said: she should make some plans. Tom, an Assistant Head with a thing for snazzy ties, gave her a gift: a coffee-table book, its cover showing Table Mountain, a palm-strewn beach, a scatter of ruins under a Turkish sky. 101 places to see before you die. General laughter. Everything worth seeing before you died was too far away, Martha said, and they laughed again, gave her an unaccountable round of applause. Life begins before you die – she saw the joke. Then her eyes became treacherous, her nose threatened to run. The wine, she thought, blinking; an unexpected act of kindness. Then the bell rang to remind her a class were waiting at the other end of the corridor. No rest for the wicked. No indeed. Everyone seemed relieved.
The class knew too – HAPPY BIRTHDAY chalked on the board in the hope of banter instead of lessons, and a cupcake from the school shop studded with jellybeans. Martha shelled out the extracts of Orwell she had brought for discussion, refusing to be deflected. She didn’t like his stuff, but it was syllabus, an instruction from the absent teacher. Dutifully, she praised the author’s tenacity, regretted the flatness of his characters, then asked for opinions. Fifth year concluded that Orwell was a creature of duty rather than passion. One, finding a photo on his phone, said Orwell looked repressed enough to implode.
His son almost drowned, Martha said. They looked at her.
They went out in a boat were caught in a whirlpool. The little boy was only four years old, but Orwell took him out into danger, then had to save him from drowning.
The class looked at her, then each other, wondering what point she was making. Martha had begun to wonder herself.
Sometimes, she said, there’s more to people than meets the eye. Repressed and paranoid and dying is not a whole picture of anyone. Maybe he was passionate too. Maybe he was more passionate than he looks.
The boys hooted, pointing at his haircut, his stupid toothbrush moustache. Nobody in their right mind would ever fancy him – he had piggy eyes.
Martha was glad when the period was done.
The blood came and went for a year before she thought twice. The GP advised a hospital check, and Martha sat in the waiting room of the same building she had been with Peter all those years ago, thinking how terrified she had been. Not now. This was a fuss about nothing. The hospital noted her weight loss, nausea, spotting between periods. Only the sudden bursts of pain seemed unexpected. The probes and scrapes were not more bearable because they were the right thing to do, but they did not last long. When no one volunteered a cause she did not push. The word cancer popped into her head, and she let it, texting how it felt. She had been waiting for something, but illness had never been a fear. That ache in her spine that faded only when – if – she slept was no more than poor posture. More than likely, the care and time they were spending on her now was a waste of valuable NHS cash. On the other hand, the word cancer came back, almost flirting. She was, she understood, not frightened. An echo, some long-lost bird from another life entirely, seemed ready to fly home to roost.
Last day, Martha took her name off the supply list. There was no need to do anything else. Temps came and went: just the nod to the authority and she was a free woman. All this time at no one’s beck and call, even a little room to extemporise, had been a good innings. Now there were other things to do, and she’d do them alone. They began with clearing: trousers that no longer fit, unloved dresses and unwise shoes, half-used cosmetics and never-opened books – things already overstocked at the charity shop. She gathered every set of class notes, minutes and reminders, keen to burn them in a fire-bucket to no more than ghosts. What was necessary to keep was not a great deal, when it came down to it. It occurred as she ransacked the cutlery drawer set on getting rid, she had not been this calm since late pregnancy. Maybe this was a kind of inversion, a clearance rather than the thing all those years ago they called nesting. It would have been amusing if she had felt less driven. Soon there was only the formal paperwork to go.
Her skin rippled at the spare room’s habitual chill. Next to the bed and the hillock of newly-bagged rubbish, the cabinet – Martha’s filing system, her cache of memorabilia – was still to go. It was important to leave things collated, clean. Not to leave a mess behind. The things in the cabinet, if she remembered correctly, were by and large, already shipshape. A few extras had been added over the years – bank-books, payslips, tedious financial stuff – but the essentials were as she had last settled them, nothing missing. The shoebox, however, should be opened.
The lid came back with a soft pop. Peter’s jumper, tinier than she remembered, his drawings, the bright red NEW ADDRESS card showed all at once. Beneath them, snaps of Riley as a younger man, some Canadian dollars, tickets for a puppet show in Montreal. One shoe no bigger than the palm of her hand, its navy blue leather gone dry as card. All to keep. She set the box aside. The green files full of birth and marriage, assets and confirmations, needed only the merest glance. Then the jewellery box. Without thinking nearly hard enough, she settled her thumbs on the gold-rimmed lid, lifted.
A waft of dust and velvet. Beneath a layer of crushed tissue paper, looking more frail than before, were the cuttings. The folded edges of the first cutout showed acid brown. Opened, however, the photo inside was exactly the same: its grey-dot composition sudden and familiar. The car. Some featureless, hired runabout, square in the middle of the frame, its tyres at a queer angle, half-sunk in mud. No marks on the bodywork, not a single scratch, showed. If it hadn’t been for the shattered windscreen, its open shark-mouth gaping over the bonnet, you’d have no idea how terrible this was, none at all.
Slowly, Martha took in its details afresh, the nothing-much content of the photo refusing to change. A woman walking a dog had found it, they told her. A woman. Martha pictured a unsuspecting soul in a car-coat holding a lead, knuckles knocking gingerly on the window. Then she would look inside. When the paper began to shake in her hands, she set it aside. What looked up from the casket now was her mother’s, face, young and wary and radiant all at the same time. Something in the quality of the photograph, the time of day, perhaps, made her quite ordinary set of features seem lit from within. Her mother in a garden, the leaves on the tree behind her wild with blossom, holding a baby, her first born, out to the watcher like a gift.
Martha settled her hand on the rug to settle herself and the cutting tipped her skin: the car, the mud, the broken-necked angle of the front tyres blatantly on show. Some godforsaken hillside in Cumbria, they said. Did they have a connection with that part of the country? Not so far as Martha knew. No suicide note either, not really; just four words on a petrol receipt, another razor blade (was it back-up?), a bottle of vodka and the car radio, on full blast till the battery gave out. After that, the stranger’s problem, the stranger’s burden to find the mess.
Overcome with shame, Martha pushed the clipping back inside the box, her mother’s picture with it. Trying not to think of blood gone black on cheap upholstery, she settled the lid then she stroked her skirt over her hips, again, again, making it smooth. She was not flustered, she told herself. She was – what? Surprised. She should have known, not opened the damn thing at all. Riley�
��s voice whispered in her ears – Get a grip, Martha. Throw that fucking casket away. Like an arm around her shoulders. Good old Riley. Get a grip, Martha. He would always be there, true and clear, dispensing restraint and disappointment. Get a grip. She almost smiled.
The consultant repeated himself, asked if she understood. Martha nodded. Endometrial hyperplasia, a short presentation on overproduction of female hormones, thicknesses of some kind where they ought not to be, an overview of statistical probabilities. She had heard every word. Understanding would take a little longer. He smiled, spoke again. There was very slim possibility of carcinoma, but it seemed as likely, in his opinion, as the present political class developing any interest whatsoever in proper handling of the NHS. He’d stick his neck out and say – he paused, looked her in the eye – it was wholly treatable.
Martha said nothing.
Given her age, he recommended hysterectomy, radiotherapy if any risk remained, but, insha’Allah – he smiled – complications were less than more likely.
There was a long, glutinous silence.
Perhaps he had been hoping she would be relieved and was disappointed by her blankness. Maybe other people said things at times such as this, whatever kind of time it was. Martha, aware it was rude, found nothing.
Well, he said. A lot to take in.
He gave her leaflets and a prescription. The important thing to remember was that this was good news. He gave her a thumbs-up. Martha said nothing at all.
The front door looked shabby when she got back, in need of repainting; the brass lock tarnished. The key, however, worked first time. Maybe she had finally got the knack. For a time, she stood at the kitchen window, wondering out of habit where the cars were going, not much caring. She spread her hands on the work top, observed the tracery of veins and tendons under the skin. She put on the radio, found the shipping forecast, turned it back off. She made a cup of tea she didn’t want, then wandered back to the balcony window. She could think of nothing, not a thing, she wanted to do. A walk maybe? The squirrel park with hazelnuts to attract company? Opening the balcony door let the sound of the motorway rush to meet her. Like opening a hive, she thought, a can of bees. The air was welcome, even if it stank of carbon emissions. It was cold. A gentle slap. Boxes and bags, the results of her former tidy-fit, made a ladder at the rail. She had no desire to welcome any of it back. On top, however, was the unwieldy coffee-table book, its glossy colours pocked with rain. South Africa, the Maldives, the fallen city of Persepolis. 101 places to see before you die. If the wind had not flapped at the cover, she might not have seen inside it at all. But she did. Anticipating, as usual: your worst fault, Martha, is the way you shock-proof yourself from surprise, the way you always need to know what’s coming. The image of Canada, all autumn leaves and heady trees, she had made in her head did not show on the pages after all. The book had blown open, not another continent, not even another country. But on Orwell’s island. All by itself, the book chose Jura.
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