by Lucy Wood
Ivor took a spoonful and raised it to his mouth, but he couldn’t do it. He pushed his bowl away. His spoon had rust on the handle. His stomach made a thin, hollow noise. ‘Soon we have to go and sit in the armchairs,’ he said.
Crystal was moving her chair closer. Ivor sat very still. What he was probably meant to do was lean in to her and smell her hair, like his father used to do to Mev.
His breathing was so fast and shallow it was as if he couldn’t catch up with it.
‘You took too many crackers,’ Ivor told her.
Crystal stopped moving for a moment, then tipped her chair back and swung on its spindly legs. She started humming something fast and looping.
Gull Gilbert turned on the TV. There was someone on there doing a magic trick with cards, but you could see where she’d tucked the spare ones in her pocket. He picked up the remote and changed the channel. A zebra was running through a wide river. He changed the channel again and there was a crowd of people. He flicked it again and again.
The room was cold and dark. The blue from the TV and the orange from the lamp cast a strange, underwater light. Crystal’s chair was almost at the point where it would snap. Gull Gilbert was staring at the screen with unfocused eyes. His hair had sprung up slowly from under its layer of gel. He kept moving from channel to channel without stopping, one image blurred into the next; there was a voice, then music, then more voices. The zebra was still in the river, the crowd of people was getting bigger. The magician’s hidden cards fell on the ground like leaves from a wilting plant.
Ivor pushed his plate off the table. It slid across the shiny wood and kept sliding, then seemed to pause for a moment before it hit the floor and shattered.
Crystal stopped tipping. Gull Gilbert blinked and looked around.
Ivor picked up his glass. It glinted in the TV’s light. He held it out over the floor, then he dropped it.
Slowly, Gull Gilbert’s elbow moved towards his plate. It teetered on the edge of the table, then broke with a hard clunking sound across his shoes.
Crystal picked up her plate, licked off the last crumbs, and dropped it. She got up and kicked her chair over behind her.
Then they all picked up their stupid eggs, raised them in the air, and smashed them into a million glorious pieces.
Ivor finally caught up with his own breath. His hand touched against Crystal’s hand and he tried to make it mean that he would miss her when she wasn’t there. Even though he didn’t know if you could say that just with hands.
The sea paced with its heavy boots through the house. If you listened closely, you could tell how high the tide was, and what kind of waves were breaking. Ivor’s father could walk out the front door and know that the waves were mushy, or that it was low tide and the waves were clean as a damn whistle.
Ivor picked up his can and rubbed the back of his neck. Later, but not now, he would clean up the house, and whoever came in next, whenever they came in next, would find, what? Not anything worth mentioning really: a scatter of crumbs, a few missing plates, a lamp that had been left on by mistake, sand in the floorboards, a smudge of breath on the bathroom mirror that could have been anyone’s.
The Dishes
The baby was teetering on the edge of speech. Bru, she would say. Da Da Da. She had a way of looking at him as if she knew. Her forehead would furrow and her eyes would go dark as oil. Then he would pick her up and carouse around the room, giddy up, giddy up horsey, while the mist pressed against the windows from the sea, wet and dripping like bedding on a line.
They were there for three months. His wife, Lorna, had a temporary posting and they’d been given the use of a small, brick house in a terraced row. Theirs was on the end and it backed onto rough ground: tussocks, bracken, horned sheep sprayed blue and red, as if they were going into battle. Beyond that were fields, hedges tangled like wires, a few lonely farmhouses. The beaches were stony. The trees were not in leaf. In front of the house there was a road that hardly anyone drove along, then a barbed-wire fence with No Entry signs and cameras that pointed in all directions. Behind the fence were the dishes, where his wife went to work every morning and came back later and later into the evening. Sometimes she would have a shift in the middle of the night, and when Jay turned over in bed to hold her, she would be gone.
The dishes were on the edge of the cliff and could be seen for miles – hard white shapes that looked like a chess set waiting to be played. They were data gatherers, listening stations, bigger than the house and smooth and silent. Some were full spheres, some were hexagonal, others hollowed like the dip in an ear. At the centre of each tilted dish there was an antenna that reached upwards, and, sometimes, if Jay watched carefully, he would see them slowly turn, like a flower might, or someone following a voice that no one else could hear.
It was early morning and Lorna had already left. Jay was in the kitchen clearing away the breakfast things. It was cold outside. Rain blew across the road in thin lines. He turned the heating up higher.
The baby was strapped in her chair. He wiped her face with a warm cloth. Her skin was so soft, almost translucent, except for all the dried food stuck to it – it was on her cheeks and on the floor. Some was in her wispy hair. She laughed and squirmed while he wiped around her mouth, then puckered her lips and blew a bubble. Jay crouched down and tried to blow one too but it didn’t work and he ended up drooling down one corner of his mouth. The baby laughed and blew another one.
‘How are you doing that?’ he said.
‘Hamna fla,’ the baby told him.
‘Oh, OK,’ Jay said. ‘I thought you were doing it a different way.’
He picked up the plates and put them in the sink, then ran the hot water until the washing liquid foamed up. He plunged his hands in and his wrists went red.
‘What do you want to do today?’ he said.
The baby banged her hands against her tray.
‘Do you want to go out anywhere?’
She banged again.
‘Or we could play that xylophone game you seem to like so much.’
She kept banging.
‘Bang your hands if you’ve got food in your hair.’
She kept banging.
‘Bang your hands if you woke me up five times last night.’
She banged again.
‘Bang your hands if you think I’m the best.’
She stopped banging.
Jay ran more hot water and swiped plate after plate with the cloth, until they were all stacked on the draining board. He liked washing up now – the hot water, the steam, how, when he rinsed out a tin of tomatoes, he pretended there’d been a shark attack. He liked the way the bubbles had bits of colour in them. He would blow them off his hands so that the baby could watch them floating. He hardly ever felt like smashing it all against the wall any more.
He dried his hands and lifted the baby out of the chair and onto her mat. There was an arched bar over it with bells hanging down. They made a dull, jangling noise when she grabbed at them. They sounded like a doorbell and he wished he’d packed her other mat – the one without any bells. They hadn’t brought much from home – just a suitcase for him and Lorna and a few boxes of the baby’s things. He liked it that this house was small and empty. He could walk around each room seeing nothing that reminded him; just a table, a couple of chairs, a sofa, a wilting pot plant on top of the fridge that he watered every day.
He sat down next to the baby, then got up again. If he sat down he would fall asleep. He had that heavy, dull feeling behind his eyes which pushed down towards his jaw. It had been five times last night; the night before he’d lost count after seven. He straightened the curtains, the chairs, then picked up the cloth and wiped at another weird stain on the floor.
‘Was this you?’ he said to the baby.
She looked at him, frowning, like it was inappropriate to even ask.
It wasn’t even nine o’ clock yet.
After a while he noticed the sound of low voices coming through t
he kitchen wall. He stopped wiping the floor. There it was again: a low murmur of voices.
The wall was thin and connected with next door, but he didn’t think there was anyone living there. When they’d arrived there weren’t any lights on, and there were no cars parked at the front. The curtains were half-drawn and there was a pile of rubble by the steps – bricks and plaster – that looked as if a room had recently been knocked through.
He couldn’t hear what they were saying. He stayed kneeling on the floor. Water dripped off the cloth and pooled next to his leg. The voices rose and fell and then they stopped. The baby let out a cry and he turned to her quickly, thought he heard a door open and close somewhere. The baby cried out again and he picked her up and cupped her warm head with his wet hands.
The front door of the house next door opened then shut with a bang. Jay sat upright in the kitchen chair, where he’d been slumped over a cup of coffee, on the edge of sleep. It was mid-morning the next day. He glanced over at the window. There was a man crossing the road further up, heading towards the dishes. Jay glimpsed the back of his coat before he disappeared through the gates.
An hour later there were footsteps behind the wall, someone ran up the stairs and there was a strange rattling, which might have been curtains closing across their runners.
It was misty again, and too cold to go out. He brought the baby into the living room and turned on the electric fire. Soon the room was warm and fuggy and smelled like burned dust. He brought out a box of toys and emptied it onto the floor. He put the rattle and the fraying bear in front of the baby, then found the spinning top, spun it up, and let it go. It whirled and clinked out tinny music. He spun it up again.
When he got bored he styled the baby’s hair into a Mohican.
At lunchtime, someone drove up near the house. The engine revved, idled for a moment, then finally stopped. Jay glanced out. There was a dark blue van parked by the side of the road, in the lay-by in front of the terrace.
He strapped the baby in her chair and put her food in a pan to warm up. ‘Mashed peas and potato,’ he told her. ‘A classic choice.’
‘Forofoo,’ the baby said. She’d twisted her bib up into her mouth and she was chewing on it.
‘It’ll be ready in a minute,’ Jay told her. ‘I just want to make sure it’s warm.’
He went over to the sink to wash his hands. He washed them twice, then scrubbed under his nails. He’d read something somewhere about how easy it was to contaminate a baby’s food and since then he’d started washing his hands more and more every day. The skin around his nails was sore to the touch.
He dried his hands and filled the baby’s bowl with food. He sat down next to her and blew on it to cool it down. ‘I just heated this up, now we have to wait for it to cool down,’ he said.
‘Forofoo,’ the baby said, trying to grab the spoon. She took a handful of food and aimed at her mouth, but most of it ran down her wrist and back into the bowl.
After a while the voices started up behind the wall. They were louder this time, closer, although he couldn’t make out any actual words. One was deep, the other sounded like a woman’s voice. There was a lot of low, drawn-out laughter.
Jay spooned the food into the baby’s mouth. He wiped around her lips, then hooked his finger gently inside her cheek to make sure she wasn’t storing any of it in there. She’d gone through a stage of doing that – he would find bits of food that she’d kept hidden all night.
She squirmed and sucked at his finger.
‘I’m only checking,’ he said. ‘You have previous, remember?’
The voices came again through the wall. He got up and went over to the window. The van was still there. ‘I’ll be back in a second,’ he said.
He went outside and knocked at next door. He waited, checking his hands for mashed-up peas. What would he say? He didn’t know. All he wanted was to speak to someone and not have them say forofoo, or whatever the hell it was, back. But there was no sound from inside. Nothing moved. There were no lights on. Upstairs, the curtains were all drawn. Downstairs, there were net curtains that were frayed and yellowing. He would have to go right up and stare in to see past them. He turned round and looked at the road. The mist had almost covered the dishes. He could only see the one closest to the fence. The metal was dripping. The antenna was tilted towards the road. It almost looked like it was pointing at him. Was it pointing at him? He took a step towards it, then stopped and shook his head. It was pointing upwards, above the houses, like it always did.
He knocked once more, then turned and went back into his own house.
He sat down at the table, spooned up the last bit of the baby’s food and put it in her mouth.
The voices started up again, and someone laughed.
He got up so quickly that his chair tipped over. He went back outside and stood there, looking around. There was no one. The van was still parked by the side of the road. It was dusty and there was sand on the tyres.
When he looked out again later, the van had gone.
At night, he watched his wife sleeping. She slept straight away, as soon as she’d checked the baby and got into bed. There were dark smudges under her eyes, as if soot had gathered in a fireplace.
Sometimes she murmured and rolled away from him to the other side of the bed. Sometimes she rolled onto his chest and buried her face in his ribs. She mumbled things he couldn’t really hear. ‘What?’ he would ask her. ‘What?’ He smoothed back her hair and rubbed her shoulder blades to settle her back into sleep.
‘What do you do over there all day?’ he asked, but he knew she wasn’t allowed to answer.
Often, the pillow would have creased the side of her cheek, and the creases would run into the fine lines that had started to gather around her eyes. When her nightdress rode up, there were lines across her stomach and the tops of her legs, the skin puckering like clay. He couldn’t take his eyes off them.
Finally he would fall asleep, but after a few moments he would jolt awake and freeze, sure that he’d been muttering, talking. What had he been saying? What if Lorna had woken up and heard him saying something?
It was only once, it had only happened once. The doorbell had rung and he’d opened it and Lorna had been working, she was always working, and he’d been on his own for such a long time.
The baby had been in the other room. He’d put music on, and afterwards he’d checked and she was deep in sleep, her arms and legs flung outwards, her hand clutching her rabbit, and that warm, sour, milky smell clinging to her which reminded him of the corridors of school many years before; how he used to get lost in the twisting maze of them.
He pressed his ear closer to the kitchen wall. The van had arrived at midday, while Jay was changing the baby. There’d been no sound from next door all morning, and he’d started to think that the van was probably there to do repairs to one of the houses further along the row. Now and again, drilling and hammering would reverberate down the terrace like a heartbeat.
But then someone had run up the stairs. The banister had creaked. A door somewhere further back seemed to shut softly.
He turned away from the wall and back to the baby, who was tipping herself backwards in her chair, trying to get out. She’d been restless all morning – crying whenever he went out of the room and throwing down toys, but if he picked her up she would go rigid and try to twist out of his arms. Her cheeks were hot and she kept scratching at her belly, and when he rubbed it for her, she just cried again. He offered up her favourite toys – the rabbit, the jangly ball – but she batted them away.
He looked around; saw only the road, the mist, the cliffs, the dishes.
He slumped down in a chair and rested his head on the table. It had not been possible, before, to know that this kind of tiredness existed. He could hardly even lift his head. When he did manage to look up, the baby had slumped down too, in her chair, and she was watching him with her head cocked sideways.
He sat up, then covered his eyes with his hand
s.
The baby did the same.
He waved his hands, and the baby waved her hands.
She watched him, without blinking, to see what he would do next.
Then someone said ‘Ssshhhh’ suddenly and loudly from behind the wall.
The baby opened her eyes wide. ‘Ssshhh,’ she said.
‘Ssshhh,’ the voice came again from behind the wall.
The baby looked around the room, then back at Jay. ‘Ssshhhhh,’ she said.
Jay shook his head. ‘You don’t need to do that,’ he told her.
‘Ssshhhh,’ the baby said again.
Jay got up and went over to her. ‘Don’t do that.’
She looked at him with her wide, dark eyes.
The sound came again from the wall.
Jay went over and knocked on it, once, twice, loud and hard.
Above him, on the roof, a tile slipped and grated in the wind.
‘Sshhhh,’ the baby said, quieter this time.
There was a swing tied to a branch of a tree at the back of the house. It was small and sturdy, with high sides for a child. Jay had tested it, and tested again, pulling down with all his strength to see if anything gave.
He put the baby in her coat and opened the back door. The misty rain had finally stopped. It was good to feel the wind against his face.
He put the baby in the swing and pushed gently. The chains creaked as they moved against the tree. He pushed and pushed and it was cold and quiet and he thought of nothing except pushing the swing and the wet, salty smell of the fields behind him.
When he looked up at the house, there was someone standing in the window.
He fumbled with the swing, missed the middle of it, and ended up pushing the baby sideways. The swing lurched outwards, rocked, then righted itself.
Jay steadied the chains. It was just his wife, wearing her coat and carrying her bag ready to leave for work. He didn’t know how long she’d been standing there; he thought she’d already gone. She was wearing the green scarf he’d bought for her just after they’d first met. He hadn’t seen her wearing it for a long time. He raised his hand and waved. Lorna’s mouth moved but he couldn’t tell what she was saying.