She had not thought he was listening, and his suggestion pleased her more than she believed it should.
‘Days of Grace,’ he said again.
When she got together with Anwar, she had wondered about something in Arabic, high on her leg, out of sight, except for him. Of course, he was not a man so keen on tattoos either. Cairo put his hands on her shoulders, moved his thumbs into the muscle there.
‘That’s nice,’ she said, eased back into him. ‘That’s it.’
She had mentioned her shoulder ached from the bag and the camera. He said when he finished boxing massage was one of the things he’d considered doing, said he used to get a rub-down after fights, after training, get the knots out of his muscles. She wanted to say that he was a strange and beautiful man. The sun came in through a gap in the curtains, moved slowly across the room.
Later, there was the sun in the room and not much else, the ebb and flow of traffic through the window, a sound that always seemed near here, often the sound of tyres on wet concrete after rain, the sound of people going somewhere else. The sun sliced across the bed. Hopper crossed her mind. And that she was becoming the woman in one of those paintings, looking towards the window at nothing in particular. A woman sitting in a pattern of sunlight in a hotel room after a man has gone. The feeling that she had done this before nagged at her. And it was true that she’d had that brief romance – yes, why not call it that? – with Marko, the fixer in Belgrade, and she had sat in a grander hotel room than this, under chandeliers, listening to distant traffic in a city and a country that considered itself cursed, and may have had a point.
After
No one speaks for a moment, they look at each other across the last of the chips. He knows what’s coming before she says it.
‘I spoke to me mom,’ is what she says, doesn’t look at him, considers her empty plate, pushes a piece of bread at a smear of brown sauce.
‘What did her have to say for herself, then?’
‘Asked if I wanted to go back.’
‘Did her apologize to yer?’
‘Her said we’d find a new way of doing things.’
‘But her day apologize to yer.’
Stacey-Ann is still wiping at her plate with her bread. We’ll find a new way of doing things, it’s what her mother had scrawled in the letter, no apology, and it’s like her dad can see through it. They have not actually spoken. Stacey-Ann texted Tony when she read the letter. Her shoulders are hunched, like she’s in some slow-motion flinch, as if he would do anything more than speak to her in this low, even voice. As if he ever has. His parents have moved their chairs back away from the table, looking at least as if they would like to disappear. He is thankful for that.
‘A woman who threw her own daughter and grandson out on the street. Who wanted her own grandson gone.’
‘Her asked me if I wanted to come back.’
‘You could say no.’
Zach starts to cry from the front room.
‘He’s hungry, Stacey-Ann,’ his mother says.
‘Yer still want to feed him, Dad?’ Stacey-Ann says, tries to sound cheerful, gets up from the chair to get the bottle.
Cairo doesn’t say anything, rises, and walks through into the front room, puts his hand down to the baby, who cries even harder. He feels Stacey-Ann enter the room behind him. This house is too small, is one of the things she might say to him if he forced her to say more, but it isn’t, and he walks to the foot of the stairs. He can see her case, Zach’s changing bag, a couple of carrier bags. He had come in the back door, of course, and she would have known he would. If they hadn’t finished work early he wouldn’t have seen them at all.
He takes the boy in his arms and sits in the armchair by the window, holds Zach tightly as he gulps at the milk. He kisses the top of the boy’s head. Zach balls his little fist. Aims a punch at his grandad’s chin and Cairo smiles at him.
‘He’s a lovely boy,’ Cairo says.
‘I’ll come round tomorrow as normal, Dad?’
She says this as if it’s a question. Back to the Saturday routine they’ve had since she was a girl. He feels the urge to see if she wants to go to the pictures, bowling, wants the years to turn back. They can walk over the park with Zach in the pram.
‘Of course,’ Cairo says.
A horn sounds from outside. He can see there is a car pulled up on the other side of the hedge, knows full well who it is.
‘Did yer book a taxi?’ he asks.
‘No,’ she says. ‘Tony said he’d come and pick me up.’
‘Of course he did.’
He overheard her once, years ago, when she was still a young girl, twelve, thirteen or so, they were here late on a Saturday night, he remembers. She was on the phone, he was late for getting back to her mother. He heard Stacey-Ann say dad and he thought she was talking to him, went to the bedroom door, his bedroom when he was a boy, his bedroom now, and said her name.
She was talking, still talking on the phone, and he heard her say dad again down the phone, no idea that she could call him that, she always said Tony to him. He had felt something slip inside himself. He crept down the stairs and said, ‘All right love?’ when she emerged.
Stacey-Ann stands at the front door with Zach. Cairo wants to help her with her bags but can’t face Tony.
‘I’ll see you tomorrow, darling,’ he says, kisses her cheek, touches Zach’s face. His mom goes to the front step. He sits down again, listens to Tony turning the car around in the narrow street, hopes he scratches it on the rose bushes that overhang the wall.
Before
She was never late, and it was on her mind that it was possible. She even felt sick one morning when she had got up with the intention of heading to the ponds and instead had to lie back down and watch the trees for a while, and her head feeling so heavy and surely, surely you could not feel it that quickly. And she did not know how she felt, how to feel about the prospect at all. She had always wanted a child and with Anwar, it was he who had said to wait, they had argued about it, in the weeks after her thirtieth birthday, such a cliché. She could never understand whether that was what began to open up the divide between them or whether that tension simply exposed existing fault lines. It didn’t matter in the end, she supposed.
She was busy in these June weeks. She tried to bury that feeling first thing in the morning, the dizziness if she turned in the pool, the heaviness of her head in the afternoon, wanted to ask her sister, ‘Was it like this for you?’ Held her tongue. One reason she had begun to spend time with her sister again was friends with babies. They had them all at the same time like some kind of epidemic. When she refused a glass of wine from Esther, her sister raised an eyebrow, said, ‘You haven’t got something to tell us, Grace?’ as a joke, and when she answered too quickly and blushed, she saw her mother raise her eyes from the New Yorker to look at her for a moment and say nothing.
So it was the morning of the 23rd, a couple of weeks late now, and the feeling of heaviness still with her, that she bought two kits at Euston station, the girl on the till smiling at her hopefully, might as well have given her a thumbs up, and pregnant women everywhere, across the concourse with their great bellies, and babies in carriers and those papoose things that she was sure everyone would assume she would want to wear if she were to have a baby, if she were to have this baby. It had reached the point where she’d be disappointed if the test said no.
She was getting the train to Sandwell and Dudley station, which was not in Dudley at all, it turned out. Franco was with her to take some shots at the polling stations. On the train that swayed and made her feel even more sick, she peed all over her hand as well as the test thing somewhere past Milton Keynes, and she looked at the thick blue lines on the tester and felt, curiously, not much at all, too hot, a bit woozy. She wondered if it was shock, a bit much to take in, and texted Cairo to say she was filming and to let her know if he was around today, and what to say to him, what to say?
After
He lies on the bed, tired, shouldn’t be this tired. All of them the same. He hopes his mother has a sleep this afternoon. Tiredness has worked through everything, like the damp that warps the walls and the back fence and the wallpaper in the bathroom, has worked its way through the hills themselves, the undermining of the tunnels and great caverns that shift below them, slowly, not in human time, bent everything out of shape in the end. But the tiredness is human, that much is certain, and the damage done.
He pictures a route up the hill, tries to concentrate on something else. Sunday mornings he would run up over the hill, along Oakham Road, try not look up towards Tony and Natalie’s house, a glance up the drive at the fancy cars, a glance up at the window he thought was Stacey-Ann’s room, lengthen his stride, the warrior. They could keep their cars and their fancy house. They would all one day be dust. He stopped often by the horses in the field a little way off the road from there. Up past the Hangman’s Tree. The hangman had come from a farm near here. Thousands would attend and watch him go about his business. They put wooden grandstands up once all along the road to Stafford jail so the crowds could see the scaffold and the hangman wrestling with the dangling, dancing figure on the rope. Cairo would spit onto the path churned with horseshoe patterns. The horses would snort in the field, one might break into a gallop. You might see the riders coming down the path and the horses would breathe and stamp in the field and he could never work out if they were happy to go out or if it was fear. Fear of pale young women in their hats and boots, with their whips.
And Cairo would bolt down the hill, racing the water that ran off and ended up in the Severn, down and over the Rowley Road and through Warren’s Hall and past the ponds and the gravel where they used to sometimes torch the cars and down the black paths, past the ruin of the engine house where the engine had pumped water from the mines, and the coal had fired the engines and the furnaces, and forged the country as it became. And here were the ruins, and here were the ghost people among them, lost tribes, fields of bones, that the people who had done so well from it all now wanted gone, erased. Not one reminder of where they had come from was to stay.
People are tired. Tired of clammed-up factory gates, but not even them any more, because look where they are working now, digging trenches to tat out the last of whatever metal was left. Tired of change, tired of the world passing by, tired of other people getting things that you and people like you had made for them, tired of being told you were no good, tired of being told that what you believed to be true was wrong, tired of being told to stop complaining, tired of being told what to eat, what to throw away, what to do and what not to do, what was right and wrong when you were always in the wrong. Tired of supermarket jobs and warehouse jobs and jobs guarding shopping centres. Work had always worn people out, the heat of furnaces, the clang of iron, but this is tiredness of a different order, tiredness that a rest will not cure, like a plague, eating away at them all.
He wants to close his eyes, with his feet off the end of the bed he slept in as a child, with nothing but the sound of the house creaking and settling, and the shush of the traffic like the tide on a distant shore and the murmur of the telly from downstairs. Tiredness like ash in your mouth.
‘What to do about it.’ That was what she had said on the message, the last one, repeated what she’d said when they’d rowed on the towpath. They were the words that Natalie had used too, when she told him about Stacey-Ann being pregnant. What to do about it. A human life. A new life. But Stacey-Ann was stubborn, at least, and the boy too, Zachariah, would cling to life, you could see that. That his grandmother wanted him gone, cut away, was something he could never know.
To start again anew: the only cure for this tiredness. To leave our old selves behind and become someone new. And babies could do that, children, they were someone new without all the old tiredness. But not for long, he supposed. What to do about it. He knows full well what she means. She’s probably done it by now.
They dump the dead babies in wheelie bins when they’ve cut them out. He saw it in the paper once. They were sheltering out of the rain somewhere. Tony had treated them to a breakfast and he looked over at one of the blokes reading the paper and there was a story about the babies being found in a bin out the back of a clinic. Not a backstreet place. A clinic in London. Not even bodies, parts of bodies he supposed, half-formed things, but flesh and blood. What to do about it, is what Natalie said, tried to persuade Stacey-Ann to get rid of the baby. It, they called it. Soft bones like jelly, sticky on the side of the bin. They cut them out. Or suck them out with something like a Hoover. He’d read that too. Had to get up from his breakfast, stood out and looked at the rain falling in the street.
‘Yow all right?’ Luke asked him. ‘Yome like a ghost. Al’s ating yer breakfast.’
‘I’m all right,’ he said. ‘I’m all right.’
He closes his eyes and sees bones bursting up out of the field below the churchyard. Sees the bones come with a life of their own, dancing through the streets. Sees the wheelie-bin lid rattle. Translucent tiny hands, curled pale bodies with little black-spot eyes, reaching out, crying out. Buckets of blood and flesh. They are monsters, these fucking people. It was strange, because Natalie had used those words to him. ‘What to do about it. What to do about the baby.’
‘Like, what do you mean, what to do about it?’ he’d said. It was as if he could see straight through her flesh, saw her jawbone as she said the words, the sockets for her eyes. As if he was talking to a skeleton, to a ghost.
‘What to do about it,’ she’d said again in her posh voice on her phone message.
‘Hello, Cairo. It’s Grace,’ she said, and he swears to God that he felt something lift in him, something move in him. Her voice, that she had phoned, and it might still all come good. He swears to himself that the sun glimmered briefly on the cut as he heard it, and that feeling must have lasted – what? – seconds. He was stood there, looking at the water, the wobbly sense of himself, and the message ended and there was another, with her voice rougher at the edges and then this last one, like she had a cold, but he realizes she must have been crying, which was to her credit, he supposes, not the chance of a tear had he seen in Natalie’s eye when she came with her what to do about it. Like we had the say over life and death. A few seconds. The sun went in again, grey water, the colour of ash. He could never tell anyone that. Who would there be to tell? The kind of thing you might tell a woman like her if you got to spend time with her. You could say: There was sun on the water. And she’d know what you meant.
But it was people like them who should be cut out, dumped in pits or bins, left to rot at the side of the road and let the crows pick them clean. Here was the anger come now, concussive episodes was a phrase they’d used, a man getting bashed in the head to put food on the table, to pay the rent. Natalie left him because she wanted to buy a house. Of course she did. It was the boxers who lived like monks he always admired, not those with the cars and the clothes, the gold teeth, the tigers on leads. Those who ran and trained quietly in the woods, would sleep in a cave if they could, drink water from streams. Live with purity, simplicity. He knew these were sometimes the same people, men drawn to excess of all kinds.
Before
They held hands, walking by the canal. The day was less busy than Grace had planned. She got the images of people queuing at a polling station, Franco was already on a train back to London.
Sometimes a heron was waiting on the bank on the other side, Cairo told her, but he hadn’t seen it for a while. He then told her how he’d legged it through a tunnel once, years ago, they let you do it at the museum. It was what they had to do in the barges before they made tunnels big enough for horses to get down. You would roll onto your back and put your feet on the tunnel roof, so low above you and the boat and the water, and walk across the bricks, push the barge onwards.
‘We should do it one time,’ is what he said. The tone in his voice and this picture of them lying side by side, as they w
alked now hand in hand by the water, no one else around, made her tell him.
She told him she wasn’t sure at first, she might just be late, of course it was possible. But she’d done the tests with two kits, she told him. And she’d booked a doctor’s appointment for next week.
He was calm as she said these things, she would swear now, like she had somehow remembered it all wrong. His face was calm and he nodded, had turned towards her. Were they still holding hands?
She said something like how they would need to decide what to do about it.
‘What do you mean, what to do about it?’
‘Well, I mean what to do.’ She still was not sure that this was anger. Uncertainty, yes. She realized now that she’d hoped he would say that’s wonderful and hold her in his arms, in spite of whatever difficulties that might come. How difficult could it be? They were adults, neither of them in a relationship.
‘What?’
‘Well, I don’t know.’
‘You do know, what to do about it.’
‘What’s the matter?’
‘You said what to do about it?’
Anger, hatred, fear in his eyes, she could see. She was aware that her back was to the water, the narrow canal towpath. The distant sound of traffic from the top of the embankment.
‘I didn’t think you’d be like this, please.’
‘Iss easy for people like you. What to do about it? What, have you done this kind of thing before?’
‘What are you talking about?’
He did raise his hands. This might be the only thing they would both agree on later, not that there was a later where they sat down to discuss matters. He raised his hands towards her, to do what? Hold her, stop her?
‘What to do about it.’
He’d pushed her, or maybe he’d pushed her, his hands were on her, and it happened so fast that she wasn’t so sure afterwards. She struggled. Her back was to the wall now. Better the wall, not the water, otherwise she might go in. She saw his face, the anger in it. They were alone on the towpath and she didn’t know him, not really, not at all. She had come here looking for something. Found something, well enough.
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