I’d like to slide my mouth up and down your perfect neck and suck on your earlobe.
Finn latched onto her in that detached way babies have of draining you.
Like a lollipop? she replied.
Cole kept on reading the paper and ignored Gitsy, who was crawling back and forth under the blue plastic airport chairs and knocking into people’s ankles. Cole looked unflustered, like the man who has it all. Finn sucked fanatically on his mother, closing his eyes to the glaring airport lights.
If you didn’t stop me, I would suck the life right out of you.
4. Green Carpet
WHEN JOAN AWOKE on 22 December, she could feel her children on their way to her. Maya, Cole and the kids were probably in Paris already. Lois and Nick would be leaving later that day. She wasn’t sure when Wim would arrive, but he lived in London, and since they shared a time zone his trip felt more like a commute.
Frank was out with the dog, and the house was as still as it was clean – a necessary foundation for chaos, thought Joan, taking a sponge from the sink and wiping the coffee ring from the kitchen table before it tattooed the wood. After she did this, she realised the coffee ring was the only crooked item in the day, and that everything big on her list was already scratched off. Today she could attend to small messes in a vacuum of other, grander messes. And then her children would arrive, and nothing would matter anyway.
Frank had stacked some logs in the basket by the wood stove. He must have chosen the logs carefully, because they were all the same width and length. She stopped to wonder if this was something Frank was likely to have done – consider the appearance of the logs in the basket, or, better still, consider her observation of the appearance of the logs in the basket. She decided the uniformity was a matter of chance.
Joan finished Frank’s tepid coffee and swept some pine needles up from under the tree. Another easy fix. Later in the week the tree would rain its needles onto the floor, but they would be too loud and too busy being a family to care.
The tree was a perfect blue-green cone with fat, moist needles. The tip of it was a foot from the ceiling, barely enough room for the blinking star Lois had made in Year Seven woodwork class. Joan walked back to the kitchen and unscrewed the top of the steel thermos they made coffee in. She emptied it into Frank’s cup, and went to the fridge to get some milk. There was something slightly obscene about how full the fridge was.
Yesterday, at the supermarket, she saw herself feeding each member of her family individually, with love. She bought endives and little cardboard baskets of overpriced greenhouse berries for Maya and the children, salami, brown-sugar biscuits and cornichons for William, and quenelles for Lois. She bought the things they said they missed on the phone, not really thinking about how it would all come together – thinking only of her little girl and how big her eyes grew when a plate of little white sausages of pounded fish smothered in red sauce was put down before her.
Joan closed the refrigerator door and walked over to Frank’s office, with the intention of fetching the boxes of photos. His computer was open on the desk. She sat down at the desk and opened Frank’s history Eldena Ruins with Bakehouse and Barn, Hünengrab im Schnee, Morning in the Giant Mountains, Mann und Frau in Betrachtung des Mondes. It was all Caspar David Bloody Friedrich.
She opened up his email and signed in with the password he thought she didn’t know – ‘GrandesJorassses’ – his trophy climb as a young mountaineer. She saw the H folder – the only folder – in the left column and knew it contained everything she needed to hate Frank. The idea of hating Frank right now, with the children on their way, seemed exhausting and senseless. Instead, she went to the drafts. She knew that the truth was mostly hesitated over. It came from the head, from the heart, but seldom got sent.
None of the drafts had subjects, apart from one. It was a question.
Dubai?
She clicked open the message. It was empty, save for the subject line.
She tried to recall the last time Frank had asked her a question. It was yesterday. He’d called and asked if he should pick up bread on his way back from walking the dog. She tried to remember the last question he’d asked that wasn’t food- or errand-related. ‘Do we have to?’ They’d been invited to a Christmas party by one of Joan’s expat friends. It was an annual gathering of the town’s British contingent that Frank tried to get out of annually. He had no interest in standing around a piano singing carols, and found the food at these things barbaric. Joan didn’t want to go either, but welcomed any excuse to separate Frank from his computer and drag him screaming into the folds of civil society.
‘I don’t know what to say to any of them,’ he ventured.
‘Oh for God’s sake, just ask after their children,’ said Joan.
Carols? Baguette? Overdraft extension? The Truth? She slammed the laptop shut and walked over to the walnut wardrobe with its hammered-gold rivets and marquetry stars.
The wardrobe was wonky and its constellations uneven. They’d bought it at a flea market in Brittany, and driven back to the Alps with it strapped to the roof of their second second-hand VW, before the kids. They continued going to Brittany after the kids were born, renting rooms in farmhouses on the same adored stretch of the coast. One morning, so the legend goes, Frank drove to the village to get croissants and came back with a farm of his own. He bought it for pennies on the pound from a woman keen to liquidate her ties to the region after a failed affair of the heart. Thus one woman’s tragedy became another family’s bliss.
The starry wardrobe was filled with relics, spares and spare relics. Fondue pots, a box that had once contained a bottle of whisky now filled with mismatched knitting needles, a sewing box that had belonged to Frank’s mother, chipped mugs that needed Super-gluing, a marble Viking chess set from the 1950s and several shoeboxes of photos.
Joan removed the biggest box and brought it into the living room. She emptied the box onto the table and scattered the photographs gently with her hands. The children looked up at her from the table with their toothy grins, summer freckles and mosquito bites. The older version of these children, she thought, had nervous breakdowns and passports that needed expedited renewal, and even children of their own who looked up at them.
Each picture boiled down to a pair of gingham catalogue-order shorts, a melting ice cream, a sunburn, a plaster cast, a certain vintage, a long-deceased bunny, a wasp sting. They were as deep as a museum diorama, and they threw up years that were over – good years that remained, but no longer existed. She picked up the photos one by one, bringing them close to her face, and then dropping them in one of three unmarked piles: one for Lois, one for Maya, one for William.
Among the photos of the kids was a black and white picture of Frank, wearing tiny mountain shorts and hiking boots and posing in front of a stony ridge. His red backpack leaned against a rock, against which was also propped a bottle of wine. Frank was smiling straight at the camera. His body was tanned and muscular – every inch of it exuding youth and confidence in his surroundings. Joan tried to coax the memory out of the mind vault of hers and Frank’s shared history, but couldn’t. Perhaps that German woman had taken the picture. She took it to the fridge and covered with it a photo from Lois and Nick’s wedding party.
The phone rang.
‘Hi, Mum.’
‘Wim. I was just looking at you a minute ago.’
‘Hmm?’
‘Sailing camp, in Douarnenez. You’re sitting on the side of a Sunfish, and you’re so cold your lips are blue.’
One year, in Brittany, they enrolled the kids in sailing camp. The children launched their dinghies from the same stone ramp Frank had used as a child. They went out into the bay on tiny boats, circling an island that was inhabited by a lonely cow. Legend had it that her calf had tumbled off the cliff and drowned, and now she haunted that same spot, mooing madly at the waves.
Frank and Joan hadn’t had that much time alone in years. They spent it walking along the harbour, avoi
ding the squished sardines that slipped through the crates to be pecked at by gulls. If it was raining they sat in a café with newspapers and magazines. That was back when there were no mobile phones, no instant connection to anyone but themselves, and the pages of magazines smelled like Guerlain perfume samples. Whenever she walked into a newsagents, Joan breathed in that new magazine smell to fan those holiday memories and keep them alive a little longer.
Brittany? Maybe she’d send an email to Frank with that as the subject line. It occurred to her only now that, in buying the house in Brittany, Frank had reconstituted a chapter from his own childhood. He wanted once again to flit between the ocean and the Alps, only this time without the in-between, high-rise poverty. She imagined the look on his face if she sent him an email titled Caravan holiday in Cornwall? God forbid they ever reconstitute any chapters from her history.
These days they only spent a week in Brittany every year, often without any of the children there. Joan suspected that Frank now saw the blessed disconnection he’d sold to them years ago as an inconvenience. Maybe they could go there in March, and make fires. She made a mental note to arrange for the chimney to be swept after Christmas. She’d oppose any plans to install Wi-Fi.
‘I finally got round to sorting the pictures.’
‘Yeah?’
‘Remember, I said I’d give you each your photos.’
‘Kind of.’
She wondered if he was eating properly. If he was struggling to keep up with his classes. If he’d run out of money, and was too embarrassed to ask.
‘When are you arriving?’ she asked.
‘Tomorrow. I’m coming on the train. Probably get in late.’
Would he like the blue sweater she’d bought him for Christmas, she wondered, or would he rather have the money? She had kept the receipt somewhere.
‘Hey, Mum, can you do me a favour?’
‘Yes.’
‘Can you look out of the window and see if there’s a red Volvo next door?’
‘Just a minute.’
Joan walked over to the kitchen window and pressed her index finger on the counter to pick up some crumbs.
‘Yes. Is that Tara’s car?’
‘Yes.’
‘Oh, lovely – she’s home too, then?’
It was still strange to think of Tara as Wim’s girlfriend. It seemed like just yesterday she’d caught them in the pantry, eating from the Nutella jar with spoons. Like just yesterday she’d picked up payphone calls from Wim, trying to renegotiate another school night curfew.
Just yesterday, in fact, Joan had watched Tara’s father nail their fake, spray-painted Christmas wreath to the front door. Tara’s mother was standing by him, arms crossed in the morning cold, overseeing the installation like it was the relaunch of the Hadron Collider. Joan had found the scene amusing. She wondered if Tara’s father also had a woman he was secretly writing to, and if Tara’s mother was the kind of wife who would smash her collectable Danish plates if betrayed.
‘Why are you doing that to the pictures?’ William asked.
‘So you can each have your share.’
‘Share? You make it sound like it’s an inheritance.’
‘It is, isn’t it?’
‘I don’t understand why they can’t all just stay in one place.’
No one ever said it, but they all considered her the Keeper. She was the one who filed away the kindergarten macaroni art, kept the children’s birthday cards in separate folders and memorised the family tree so that twice-removed Sicilian cousins on Frank’s side could be put into context as and when needed. She was the one who carried the burden of keeping everything in One Place.
Frank’s indiscretion got her thinking about turning One Place into Two. Or rather, his indiscretion had added value to the idea that she might be better off living without him, somewhere else – a thought that popped up as reliably as the mole that tore holes in the lawn every spring. But up until now, the thought had been born of an abstraction – the itch of any marriage, the tedium of the everyday realisation that nothing ever changes, not even the foolish hope that it might. Now Frank had actually given her a reason to upend their lives. And if a move was on the cards, the preservation of the family archive would have to become a shared burden. Was that why she was sorting the pictures? She wasn’t sure.
‘Call us when you’re on the train.’
‘I will,’ said Wim. ‘I’ll text Lois.’
‘See you tomorrow, darling.’
‘Bye.’
Joan took three big envelopes from Frank’s desk and labelled them with the children’s names. She finished dividing the photos, faster now, and took the stuffed envelopes upstairs. She laid them out on their beds, which were tucked in neatly like hotel beds.
She thought of the thousands of times she’d roused them from their beds in the morning to get them ready for school. When they first moved to the new house the girls rejected their newfound privacy and slept together for almost a month. In the mornings she would find Maya and Lois coiled around one another in Maya’s bed, tangled up in those cold, unclear fears that age only makes clearer and colder.
Frank and the dog would be gone for another half-hour, she hoped.
Joan went to the bathroom and started running a bath. She took off her clothes and stood in one of the warm patches she knew how to locate, where the underfloor heating actually worked. She wiggled her big toes inside her sweatpants and walked her eyes up her legs. There were some barely noticeable ripples around her knees, which looked softer now than ever before. She had good legs. Had always had good legs. ‘Chi ti chiama gorgeous?’ an Italian boyfriend once asked her. ‘Scommetto tutti ti chiamano gorgeous.’
The same Italian boyfriend used to rub the crotch of his Levi’s with a wire brush so that they might look used there. What was he doing now, she wondered. He was probably married. Perhaps he was having an affair, too. Perhaps she could find him and have an affair with him. She wondered how other women had the confidence to let themselves be desired.
The bath was almost full and the bubbles were like a thick coat of icing on a wedding cake. Joan looked at herself, and saw that there were parts of her that hadn’t changed in years. The flesh on her thighs was softer, perhaps. Her arms, too. All this softness that eroded your angles with age. It was enough to harden you. She looked at her tummy. The kids had not given her stretch marks, but they’d stretched everything else that was stretchable – including her forbearance.
Frank had never made a secret of his desire to be alone, obsessing over one thing or another. For years he carried a notebook in which he scribbled thoughts of a botanical or architectural nature, collected questions and listed topics for future research. He dawdled in bookstores, dragged the children to the library at the weekend, and generally pursued a great many interests he seldom shared with anyone. In time, the notebook became a laptop connected to endless avenues of fact and, instead of his signature vanishings, Frank became known for his infrequent apparitions. It was the difference between being an escapologist and just not being there in the first place.
That was the thing about obsessions, thought Joan, applying a green clay mask to her face. They start off as silk thread and end up a cocoon. Frank had woven a cocoon around himself. He could see through it, breathe through it, eat through it, and every now and again fuck through it, but no one had any idea really how alive he was in there.
Downstairs the front door opened and she heard Frank call the dog in. She wondered for a moment if she had forgotten to log out of his email, and then decided it didn’t matter if she had. ‘Who’s a good boy?’ said Frank.
Not you, thought Joan.
Joan stepped into the tub and reviewed the fights that were about to be had. Maya and Lois would bicker about the bedrooms. Or rather, Maya would make assumptions about which room had been allocated to whom, and Lois would pretend not to care, but throw tiny daggers about other things. Lois and Wim would fight because they were so similar. Everyone
would yell at Frank at some point, and he would feel besieged. Maya would stage a one-person intervention for Frank’s benefit, and would get upset when it was her feelings that got hurt. Probably, no one would fall out with her, she thought, but Lois might make her feel pathetic.
The bath was stinging-hot, the French postal service had promised to deliver the last of the presents she’d ordered tomorrow, and the kids were on their way. Almost on their way.
*
Lois spent her last hour at work putting subtitles under a Catholic priest in Bangui. The priest was running a mission house, which dispensed first aid to Catholics and Muslims alike. He insisted on this point. She copied his thoughts about God’s children and the new dispensary, and how peaceful life was before people started shooting and hacking at each other with machetes, and pasted them at the end of a text file called The Warlords Love Poetry Project.
She’d started on this project soon after landing the subtitling gig. It was a way not to be left with just the truth, which was blunt and bloody, and had a body count. She chopped up the subtitles, the translated words and sentences of generals and foot soldiers, and reassembled them into love poems. The more sentimental the better. She took army and militia chiefs, UN peacekeepers and aid workers and turned their strategies into sweet nothings. The priest offered some good staples – words like ‘brother’, ‘love’ and ‘surgery’.
Two years ago she had embarked on a similar exercise with travel plaza reviews left by the public on Yelp and other ratings websites. It was her way of digesting Americans – those foreign creatures – by compiling what they wanted for their cars and bellies, their leisure and personal hygiene requirements, and then organising it into verse. It was the ultimate act of translation.
‘How will you ever get used to them?’ Frank asked Lois, when she made it clear she wouldn’t be coming back to France after her MFA. That summer, Joan, Frank, Maya and William travelled to Fishers Island to see Lois be married off by a priest. The church ceremony was followed by an unceremonious piss-up at Nick’s parents’ house. Later, Nick’s father pulled out his nautical charts for Frank.
Stories We Tell Ourselves Page 6