by Mary Lawson
He took off his coat and hat and gloves and tossed them into the corner, settled himself into his place and opened The Grapes of Wrath.
“To the red and part of the gray country of Oklahoma, the last rains came gently, and they did not cut the scarred earth. The plows …”
A hand Tom didn’t recognize set a glass of water down in front of him.
“Hi,” the owner of the hand said. “What can I get you?”
He didn’t recognize the voice either. What was a stranger doing waiting on tables in Harper’s? Then he remembered: Jenny Bates had left, gone to Calgary. This would be the new waitress.
“A hot beef sandwich, fries and coffee,” he said, not looking at her. It wasn’t polite, but she needed to know from the outset that he didn’t welcome chit-chat.
“Oh, hi, it’s you!” she said. “Did you get home all right that night with all that food on the sled?”
Tom’s head jerked up. It was her—the Amazon—the nightmare from the grocery store who’d tried to force carrots on him.
“I had to spend the night there!” she said, happily rattling on. “It was my last day and I was so bored in that job I was counting the seconds and then that stupid storm came along and my brother couldn’t come to get me and I had to spend the night! Anyway”—she grinned at him—“it’s great here. I love it! I’ll get your lunch, hot beef, fries and coffee coming up!” She bounced off in the direction of the kitchen.
Tom stared at the table, incredulous. It was unbelievable! Not only was Harper’s the only place to eat for thirty miles, it was his one remaining refuge. He couldn’t go home because Sherry the Slut would be there, he couldn’t go to the library because Reverend Thomas might be there, and there was nowhere, literally nowhere, else to go.
Calm down, he told himself. You’re overreacting. Just ignore her. She cannot make you talk to her. Read your book.
He pulled The Grapes of Wrath closer and leaned over it, elbows on either side, head in hands, like he was studying for some critical exam and must on no account be disturbed.
“To the red and part of the gray country of Oklahoma, the last rains came gently, and they did not cut the scarred earth. The plows …”
A bowl of coleslaw landed on the table in front of him.
“Our extra-special Coleslaw Deluxe!” the Amazon announced proudly.
Tom stared at it: bits of raw vegetables sticking out of a thick white goo.
“It’s on the house!” the Amazon said. “It’s our new campaign to help everybody in Struan keep healthy over the winter. For the next two weeks everybody who orders a meal gets free coleslaw thrown in!” She was beaming at him. He wasn’t looking at her but he could feel the beam.
His mouth had gone dry. He licked his lips. He hated all vegetables without exception and he hated goo even more. “I don’t want it,” he said, his voice scraping out.
“You haven’t tried it yet! You’ll love it! It’s got apple and cabbage and carrots and onion and chopped walnuts and homemade mayo. I made it myself and Mrs. Harper thinks it’s fabulous!”
“I don’t want it. I hate coleslaw.”
“This is absolutely nothing like normal coleslaw! I promise! You’ll love it! And it’s really, really good for you!”
He could leave, or he could throw it at her and then leave; those were the only options.
“Excuse me,” a voice said.
The big blond guy in the booth across the aisle was leaning sideways, trying to catch the waitress’s attention. Tom could see him in the periphery of his vision.
“Could you come here for a minute, please?”
“What?” the waitress demanded. The cheerful tone disappeared as if she’d chopped it off with an axe.
“Could you come here, please?”
Out of the corner of his eye Tom saw her go. She stood in front of the man, hands on hips. The man said something to her in an undertone.
“I wasn’t!” the waitress said hotly.
The man said something else.
“Well, he doesn’t have to eat it! I’m just offering it! Mrs. Harper said I could!”
The man’s voice became fractionally louder—he sounded as if he was holding onto his temper by a rapidly fraying thread. “She didn’t say you could ram it down people’s throats! Take it away! Bring him what he asked for!”
The waitress spun on her heel, marched over, whipped the coleslaw from under Tom’s nose and marched out. The kitchen door swung shut.
Tom glanced at the man and inadvertently met his eyes. The man looked embarrassed. He gave a slight shrug and said, “Just ignore her. She’ll probably get the sack in a day or two.” He went back to his newspaper.
Tom felt dazed. He wasn’t sure what had happened. It seemed as if he’d been rescued by a total stranger. Was that right? If so, had he looked as if he needed rescuing? Did he look that bad, that near the brink? Because obviously, if that were the case—if a complete stranger felt he had to intervene on his behalf when a waitress brought him an unasked-for salad—then he mustn’t come here anymore. It wasn’t fair on other customers. He’d have to go straight home when he finished his shift.
The thought appalled him. He realized suddenly how much he depended on Harper’s. It provided human contact without making any demands on him. Going to a café and having something to eat—that was a normal thing to do, it made him feel normal. And the irony was he’d thought he was doing better over the past few weeks. The feeling of balancing on a knife edge had eased; things didn’t get to him as much as they had.
The waitress set his hot beef sandwich down in front of him, went across to the counter, brought back the coffee pot, poured his coffee, set down the cream.
“Say if you want more coffee,” she said. Her tone was sulky, like a kid who’s been told off.
The hot beef sandwich looked just as usual but he was no longer hungry. He sat motionless, listening to the background chatter around him. More people were coming in, taking advantage of the clear roads, seeking company after a week of enforced isolation. The waitress sped back and forth to the kitchen. She moved so fast he could feel the air stir in her wake.
The stranger in the booth opposite stood up—again Tom saw him in the periphery of his vision—and started pulling on his coat. When the Amazon passed on her way to the kitchen he caught her arm.
“Six o’clock?” he asked.
“Half past.” She sounded sullen. “I have to tidy up and help wash the dishes.”
“Okay. I’ll be back then.”
She started to turn away but he caught her again and said in an undertone, “And don’t bully people. They don’t like it.”
She shrugged him off.
It wasn’t until the outer door of the café swung shut behind the stranger that the words and the tone in which they were spoken sank in and Tom realized their meaning. Then it was like breaking the surface after a long dive, relief like oxygen flooding through his veins.
The way the man spoke to the waitress—that was not a tone you used with a stranger, it was a tone you used with someone you knew very well who irritated the shit out of you on a regular basis. He was coming to collect her at the end of her shift. “My brother couldn’t come and get me,” she’d said, referring to the night at Marshall’s Grocery. He was her brother! The way they responded to each other—instantly annoyed—obviously they were siblings; he of all people should have recognized that. They even looked alike, both of them big-boned and blond. The guy was quite a lot older, mid-thirties, whereas the girl was in her late teens, but there were bigger gaps than that in Tom’s own family.
“Don’t bully people,” the man had said. “They don’t like it.” “They don’t like it,” not “He doesn’t like it.” Which meant—this was the critical bit, and Tom examined it from all angles to be sure he wasn’t kidding himself—that the reason he had intervened when she was going on about the coleslaw was not that Tom looked as if he was about to fly apart but because she was always going on about blood
y vegetables and it drove him, her brother, insane. Tom was so relieved he felt like laughing. God help the poor guy: she was even worse than Meg.
He started eating his hot beef sandwich. It was no longer hot, but he didn’t care; it was excellent anyway. He watched the girl surreptitiously as he ate. Her bounce had come back now that her brother had gone. She was chatting to everybody as she steamed by. Most of them were obediently eating the coleslaw, laughing about it. “Now you eat that up!” he heard her say. The door opened and a woman came in with a little kid bundled up in a snowsuit. The waitress squatted down in front of him and said, “Well, hi, handsome, how are you today? You’re all snowy—is it snowing out there?” and the kid’s face lit up. You could see he thought she was the best thing since sliced bread.
She wasn’t really that bad, Tom decided. He recalled that she’d offered him the sled at the grocery store without him asking for it, which was a point in her favour. Yes, she was irritating, but it wasn’t the end of the world. He could put up with that.
“More coffee?” she asked a minute later as she whizzed past his table.
“Yeah,” Tom said. “Thanks.”
There is a law of nature—or at any rate of human nature—that says you should never, ever, allow yourself to think for a single minute that things are finally getting better because Fate just won’t be able to resist cutting you off at the knees.
At five o’clock that afternoon his mother appeared in the doorway of the living room looking wild, her hair all over the place, her face white as chalk. “He’s gone!” she said.
Tom lowered last week’s paper. “Who is?”
“The baby! Dominic!” Her eyes were wild too, ringed with dark circles.
“Where did you see him last?” Tom said.
“I don’t know! I don’t know! I had him but now he’s gone!”
“He won’t have gone far, Mum. He can’t even crawl.”
“But he’s gone! He’s gone!”
Adam emerged from his lair beside Tom’s chair. A waft of stale urine came with him. “He’s there,” he said, pointing at a pile of blankets on the sofa. As he spoke the blankets twitched and a very small foot appeared.
“Oh my darling!” their mother said. “Oh my darling. My darling.” She picked up the pile of blankets and buried her face in it.
Tom watched her uneasily. Maybe she’d been like this after the rest of them were born, but it definitely seemed to be getting a bit extreme.
Adam was standing watching her, his fists tucked up under his chin.
“Mum,” Tom said, “Adam needs a bath.” But she didn’t seem to hear him. That at least was normal.
After she’d gone Adam said, “I can do a bath.”
“Can you? Can you soap yourself?”
“Yes.”
“Okay. Go do it, then.”
He went back to the paper. It was distinctly old news but it was either that or start The Grapes of Wrath for the third time.
The waft of urine returned. Tom looked up from the paper. Adam was standing in front of him with nothing on, shivering.
“What’s the matter?” Tom said.
“I can’t do the taps.”
“Oh. Okay.” Reluctantly he put down the paper and went upstairs, Adam at his heels. The bathtub looked disgusting. In fact, the bathroom looked disgusting. Tom refused to notice it but was suddenly hot with fury that his father obviously refused to notice it too. He put the plug in and turned both taps on full. Adam was standing on the outside edges of his feet, toes curled in to limit contact with the freezing linoleum. His dirty clothes were in a heap on the floor.
“Do you have something clean to put on?”
“I don’t know,” Adam said. His teeth were chattering. Tom felt the bathwater. “Get in,” he said, turning off the taps. “It’s warmer in there.” Adam climbed into the bath. His ribs looked fragile as a bird’s nest. Were all four year olds that thin? How should he know? Why should he know?
In an expanding rage Tom went down the hall to what used to be Meg’s room and was now Adam’s. The smell assaulted him as he walked in. The bed had been roughly made but apart from that the place was a dump. His anger billowed out to include Sherry the Slut. She had to go; someone had to tell her to go and it wasn’t going to be him. And since his mother wasn’t in a state to do anything about anything, it was his father’s job. Why the hell hadn’t he done it already? Why the fuck haven’t you fired her and got in somebody good? he said to his father inside his head. Why the fuck aren’t you doing anything about this fucking family!
He jerked open the drawers and rummaged about until he found a reasonably complete set of clothes and took them back to the bathroom. Adam was curled over, soaping his feet. His vertebrae stood up like tiny mountain peaks. His hair stuck out all over the place. It had snot in it; there was nothing else it could be.
“How about your hair?” Tom said. He must have sounded angry because Adam looked at him quickly, his eyes wide.
“Can you wash your hair yourself?”
A shake of the head.
“Lie back, then. Get it wet.”
He washed Adam’s hair, tipped him back and sloshed water around to rinse it, sat him up again and washed his back and around his neck and under his arms. It was all he could do not to scrub him savagely—he felt savage; he was so angry he could taste it in his mouth like bile. When Adam was clean he hoisted him out of the bath and wrapped a dirty towel around him.
“Okay,” he said. “Dry yourself and put these on.”
He went downstairs and knocked on the door of his father’s study. His heart was pounding so hard it shook his chest. When there was no reply he opened the door and went in. His father wasn’t there. Tom checked his watch—it wasn’t yet six o’clock. He swore. He wanted to confront his father now, this minute, while he was still angry enough not to chicken out. But then, as he was leaving the study, he heard the front door open. He swiftly crossed the floor to the entrance hall. His father was hanging up his coat.
“I need to talk to you,” Tom said.
“Oh?” His father looked at him in surprise. Then he said, “Well, good, I’ve been wanting to talk to you too. Let’s go into my study.”
They went into the study and his father sat down at his desk. “Take a seat,” he said, nodding at the chair in the corner. His tone was formal but pleasant. Tom guessed it was the way he spoke at work. He hadn’t switched into family mode yet.
“No thanks. It’ll only take a sec. I just wanted to say—”
“Take a seat, Tom.”
Tom dragged the chair out of the corner and sat down. He could feel the anger giving way to dread or despair or whatever it was his father inspired in him nowadays. He was bitterly aware of his father’s disapproval of him, of the fact that he still hadn’t “pulled himself together.” He was aware of it every minute of the day. But he needed to put it out of his mind because it didn’t matter now. What mattered now was that he said what had to be said, which was, This family is going to hell and you have to do something about it.
He looked down, focused on the floor, trying to summon up the force that was needed to get the message through.
“Now then,” his father said. “You go first. What was it you wanted to say?”
Tom drew a breath. “There’s something wrong with Mum,” he said, still looking at the floor. “She’s not—”
The outer front door slammed and then the inner door. Peter yelled, “You fucking moron!” and the boys charged through the living room and into the kitchen.
“I don’t know what it is,” Tom continued, “but there’s definitely something wrong with her. And Adam—”
Corey yelled, “Bastard! You stupid, bleeding, bloody … bastard, I’m going to tell—” A crash, followed by a cry of rage or pain, followed by the familiar sound of a body bouncing off a wall.
Tom looked up and saw the anger rising in his father’s face, saw that he wasn’t listening. This is useless, Tom thought. He’s us
eless. This whole fucking family—the whole fucking world—is useless.
He stood up and walked out and went up to his room and shut the door.
CHAPTER TEN
Megan
London, February 1967
Megan lost her virginity—or more correctly, gave it away—on a wet Wednesday night a year and a bit after arriving in England. She was glad to be rid of it. It was a leftover from childhood, a barrier, mental as well as physical, to seeing herself as fully in charge of her life.
She’d always disapproved of “sleeping around” on principle and had no intention of doing so, particularly as men kept trying to talk her into it, but over the course of many long nights alone in her box room and then many more long nights alone on the top floor of the hotel, she’d had time to think about such things and had failed to find a single reason why people shouldn’t sleep together if they wanted to. If you weren’t being pressured, if you were old enough to know what you were doing, if you took care not to beget an unwanted child, why exactly shouldn’t you? This business of saving yourself for your husband—if ever there was an idea indisputably thought up by a man, that was it. And anyway, she wasn’t going to get married. Marriage led to children and she’d done children. So the only question was, might she want to have sex, if not now then at some not-too-distant date, and the answer was yes, if she happened to feel like it and the time/place/person were right. Judging by the amount of time other people spent doing it and talking about it, it was something you didn’t want to miss out on altogether.