by Jo Baker
Leaning on the washbasin, she rinsed her mouth, splashed water on her face. Her eyes were wet, bloodshot. She felt light, empty, better. The weave of her canvas bag was still pressed into her cheek.
Cold air blew through the ventilators. Over the tannoy, a Nordic-sounding voice was patiently explaining the docking procedure. Through the glass, through the grainy grey dirt, Claire could see the rain-curtained crags and knotts, the flat grey sands. Warton, Arnside, Grange. Three rows in front of her, the young woman read her magazine, the child slept on her lap.
In the bustle and rush to disembark, she glimpsed a fold of dogtooth coat, a flash of white trainer, then for a moment saw Margaret fully. The old woman was deeply engaged in conversation, her grey head bent back to look up at a tall, balding man. Claire started forward, faltered. She didn’t push her way through to speak to her. She still didn’t know what it was she wanted to ask.
The bus dropped her at the crossroads and pulled away. The drizzle had thickened to steady rain. After the warm muggy atmosphere of the bus, Claire breathed in cool clean air. A car passed, its tyres sounding sticky against the wet tarmac. Claire turned up the laneway, towards the village.
Uphill between high banks, old hedges dripping. She hitched the bag up her shoulder. The road had been pressed into the earth by years of passing feet and hooves and wheels. Every evening, seven years, that same weary walk up the hill. Schoolbag over her shoulder, games kit, hockey stick shifting and slipping under her arm. It was all too big for her, her school stuff: she could never get a good grip on anything. And Jennifer loping along, half a pace ahead, lean legs in sheer, forbidden tights and miniskirt, carrying her bags as if they were inflated. Claire, water trickling down her nose, could almost see the young imagined Jennifer striding along beside her. She flickered, shimmered in the corner of her eye. Claire didn’t look directly. She muttered at her out of the corner of her mouth.
“You know what I’ve always hated about you?”
She trudged on, not looking round. Mud ran in brown rivulets across the tarmac.
“You’ve always had it so fucking sorted.”
She stepped over a fallen branch.
“I mean, right from word go. There was never anybody that you couldn’t make love you. Anything you did looked cool. You’d buy a manky old jumper from Oxfam for a pound, and next thing you’d know, there’d be manky old jumpers just like yours in all the shops at fifty quid a throw. Manky old jumpers would be the next big thing, just because of you. Everything you touch—”
The bag slipped down her arm again. She tugged it back into place. She could almost see the imagined girl falter, as if hurt. Claire felt ridiculous, mean, but couldn’t stop.
“Every single thing you touch turns to twenty-four-carat solid fucking gold. But it’s not that that pisses me off,” she continued. “What pisses me off is that you don’t even notice. You swan around wearing your manky old jumper and your wonky smile and your glossy confidence and you never once realise how lucky you are. You have no idea how easy it is, being you.”
She glanced round. Grass verge, hedge. Dripping leaves, nettles, a clump of sodden harebells.
“And it’s not as if I’m going to tell you.”
She wiped the rain off her face. Her skin felt cool to the touch. She walked on.
At the top of the hill she paused to catch her breath. She leaned on a wooden fencepost, felt the damp soak into her sleeve, and looked out across the known, familiar place. Ahead, the flat rich watermeadow, long grass dotted with Friesians. The river was hidden by its banks and a lacy screen of coppiced willow trees. It would be low, despite today’s rain. The rocks would be green and slippery with algae. Ahead, the old road, lined with thick dripping oaks, hugged the base of the hills. The Robin Hood tree was still there, up ahead, dark with foliage, but the Krynoid was now just a weather-bleached stump, cut down while she was still a child. Heavy grey clouds lay like a lid on top of the encircling crags. At the far end of the valley the hills rose again, and there, on the far slope, were the first houses of the village, clinging, crumbling, slipping.
The last house in the close. Its pitched roof was bright with moss and lichen. Smoke swelled slowly from the chimneypot, did not rise. Every evening on the way home from school she had glanced up, picked out that house amongst all the others. Number eight.
Home.
Claire knew, so well that she couldn’t remember a time before knowing, that her parents had come there because of Joseph’s new job. They’d packed their wedding-present tea sets and dinner service, and the orange nylon quilt bought with Green Shield stamps, into the boot of the Hillman Imp, and driven up the empty motorway in hot July sunshine, Moss with his head out of the open window, Anne with an arm around his barrel chest. Moss, Claire knew, had been a wedding present too; he had left pawprints down the front of her mother’s white dress. Moss and the tea sets were now long gone, but the dinner service remained, minus two plates and a coffee cup, in the sideboard.
Claire also knew, though didn’t know why she had been told, that when her mother had gone to the doctor back in London, three weeks late and giddily nervous, the doctor, gruff and unconcerned, had waved her away. She should come back, he had told her, in two months’ time, if she still hadn’t bled. Then, and only then, would they see about a test, any earlier being a waste of everybody’s time. And Anne had resolved, then and there, never to go back, and to find a new GP, a nice GP, a family doctor, up north.
It wasn’t that the north had smelt different from the south, but there was a different timbre to the air, a distinct quality to the light, Anne had always said; and Claire, struggling back and forth from Oxford, had soon come to the same conclusion. Southern air, she thought, was stifling, dulled, and the light seemed overused. And there was, she thought, her feet slapping down on the wet tarmac, the jolt of each step resonating through ankles, knees, hips, this same quality of northernness to Belfast; the air fresh with rain, light sheering down through broken cloud, the hills suddenly miraculous with sun. Which was why, perhaps, it sometimes almost felt like home.
Claire’s father had worn his desert boots tied with string, and her mother had met him first in Rag Week, at a pyjama party. Anne had studied geography, loved best the close measurements, the precise lines of mapmaking. Her black cartography pen, unused since graduation, had long since been passed on to Claire. In the photograph, Anne’s fingertips are inkstained. She is smooth cheeked, smiling, white-pyjama’d. Her eyes are blinked shut in the flash, and Joe’s arm lies lightly on the table in front of her, his striped sleeve rolled to the elbow, the muscles in his forearm clear and strong.
Through the wire fence, Claire looked out across the thick wet grass of the meadows, and thought of her parents driving up that road together for the first time. A summer evening, the light low, and the grass dry and pale. And it would have seemed to them, perhaps, that it was always summer there. Later, sitting beside her husband on the slate bench in front of the pub, with Moss lying stretched out like a rug on the sunwarmed paving slabs, Anne had sipped flat pub lemonade, and noticed for the first time the creases and ridges in the summer-scorched grass, the parch-marks patterning the whole breadth of the valley floor. These, she had told her daughter, Claire didn’t know how long ago, were fieldstrips, old boundaries, pathways, far older than the ancient drystone walls. This land was written on by generations, she had said. And Claire, glancing back from the rich wet grass to the tarmac beneath her feet, watching the water flick back over her shoes as she walked, dampening the suede, leaving behind a trace of grit and road-dirt, wondered what it would be like to see this place unmediated, for the first time. To not have been told.
Because the people who had walked this road into the earth, worn the pathways across the land, held each glacier-scattered stone a long moment while considering where best to place it in the composition of a drystone wall; their lives had made these marks; they had not been told. Lives lived in the old village, up the valley, generation up
on generation. And when the decision was taken to build the dam, they had carried on, shifting their lives to the new village down the valley. They must have gone back, now and then, to look for something lost or forgotten, or to lift the potatoes when they came into season, but as the water rose, swelling the tarn, seeping over the banks to wet the earth, lifting the dust from the cobbled street, slopping over thresholds, hearthstones, windowsills, creeping up stairwells, would they still keep climbing the hillside to watch? When it eased over the last chimneypot and drew the chapel weathervane forever due west with the current, was there anybody there to see it, or were they all already settled in their new dry houses down the valley, with their electric lights and electric fires and carpets that reached all the way to the walls, fiddling with the TV aeriel instead? And why not, Claire thought. Because, when it came down to it, it was just a place, and they were the village. They still are. And then there’s the offcomers like us.
Claire, feeling a catch in her lungs, a numbness in her legs, turned the last bend before home. The climb had, she realised, almost been too much for her. At the garden wall she put a hand out to rest herself. Her heart was skitterish, her breath harsh.
Through the gateway, she could see the front room. The light was on, and she watched, uneasily, the small familiar form of her mother moving, bending, straightening. Setting things to rights. She was always setting things to rights. Plumping up cushions, piling up newspapers, offering whispered explanations. For her mum, Claire knew, there was always a neat, orderly way things should be arranged, an answer for everything.
The rain was still falling steadily. Her jacket felt cold and heavy. Her trousers, from mid-thigh down, were drenched; they stuck clammily to her legs, irritating the cuts. Her hands and feet were numb with cold; her whole body seemed to be bristling with goosepimples. She put a hand on the gatelatch. She saw her mother cross the room, dip down in front of the fireplace. Stoking up the fire. Keeping the place warm. Dad, immobile, got cold easily.
Claire hesitated, slipped back behind the wall again and hunkered down, her bag between her knees. She should have phoned. She couldn’t just march up the drive and ring the doorbell. And she couldn’t wander round the side of the house to the back door and slip in through the kitchen either. A revenant, her sudden, sodden appearance would send her mother’s blood pressure sky-high, might blow another fuse in Dad’s brain. Claire stood up uncomfortably, wet clothes clinging to her skin, and dug a hand into her trouser pocket. She held out a palmful of cold change, picked out a 10p piece, walked up the village street to the phonebox.
“Hello, Mum?”
“Claire? This isn’t your usual time. Is everything all right?” Claire heard for the first time the Englishness, the southernness, in the familiar voice.
“Fine.” Claire kept her voice level, cheerful. “I just thought I’d call you. Let you know. If it’s okay with you, I thought I’d come home for a bit.”
“Of course it’s okay. It’s wonderful. When are you coming?”
“Well, now, really.” Claire laughed uneasily, pushed the hair off her face.
“I’ll pick you up. When are you due in?”
“Mum, I’m in the phonebox. Just up the road.”
A breath.
“What are you doing there?”
Claire bit her lip, said nothing.
“Listen, I’ll come and meet you.”
The phone went dead. Claire hooked the handset back in place, pushed out of the phonebox. Still gnawing at her lip, tugging at a slip of dry skin there, she shrugged her bag up her shoulder, set off slowly back towards the house. This could not, she realised, go unconsidered, undiscussed. This was all too dramatic to avoid comment. Her pace slackened. She could have handled it so much better. She should have thought ahead.
Her mother was coming up the slope towards her. She hadn’t put a coat on. She was steaming along in her sweatshirt and jeans, her grey hair limp and heavy in the rain. Obviously she had decided that this was a crisis. Claire stopped. For a moment, she considered turning on her heel and running full tilt, rucksack bouncing on her back, up past the phonebox, past the pub, up to the reservoir and along the bank, up Rise Hill and over the horizon, while her mother followed relentlessly, like a Terminator, rattling out questions like machine-gun fire. But instead she stood there, soaked, as her mother marched doggedly up the slope towards her. She stopped just in front of Claire, her face a puzzled mix of delight and worry. Claire reached out and hugged her, her cheek pressing against the wet grey hair.
“What’s all this about then?”
Claire let her go, tugged her bag up her shoulder. Stopped biting at her lip.
“My God, you’re so thin. I can feel all your ribs. And you’re pale. I knew you wouldn’t be eating properly. We’d better get you indoors before you catch your death. Come on.” She grabbed hold of Claire’s bagstrap, tried to take the bag. “Give me that. I’ll carry it.”
“I can manage, Mum. Really.”
“Why didn’t you call sooner?” Her mother set off down the street, disappointed. “Your dad’s in a right state.”
“Sorry.”
He wasn’t. He was sitting in his armchair, grinning lopsidedly, a pool of spittle gathering inside the slack corner of his lower lip, holding out his hands towards her. Claire felt an unexpected surge of relief. He knew her. She realised she’d been afraid that he wouldn’t. She leaned down and hugged him awkwardly. He laid his heavy arms across her back, kissed her clumsily on the cheek. She felt her face crease up with pleasure.
“Hello, Daddy.”
He nodded, said something. She could tell from the inflection that it was a statement, not a question. She grinned at him, sat down on the floor, leant against his warm heavy legs.
“Go and get changed, there’s a good girl. You’ll make your father wet too.”
When she came back downstairs, in her dry cords and T-shirt, the TV had been switched on. It remained on throughout dinner. Her mother heaped Claire’s plate high again and again. Television continued throughout the evening. Local news, a game show, a wildlife documentary. While her father was still in hospital, Claire had mostly stayed at Jennifer’s, her mother had mostly stayed at the hospital. Both of them waiting in their solitary bleached-out exile, desperately wanting to be told they could go home. It was only when they got home that they recognised fully the change that had occurred. Not in Joseph, not in each other, but in home. It had suddenly seemed stuffed full of absences. From the moment Claire entered it again, she found herself stumbling and suffocating on the big soft bubbles that filled the place.
One evening, tired from school, Claire had found herself standing over him, talking to him slowly, simply, as if he were a child. He had looked up at her in silence, blinking lopsidedly. She had seen herself suddenly, from where he was sitting, and had had to run off upstairs without finishing her sentence. She had beaten her head against her bedroom wall. “Arsehole. Fucking arsehole,” her nose bubbling and tears running down her face. The thick breezeblock and plaster wall was percussionless. No one heard. She had come back downstairs dry-eyed and sore and smiling. She sat at his feet in silent apology. His heavy hand had rested on her head, clumsily stroked her hair. Whenever she remembered it, how ever long it was afterwards, that moment could still make her crumple up inwardly, make her want to hurt herself.
The three of them had come to a tacit agreement. They had filled up the soft unmanageable emptinesses with constant TV. The incessant voices, music, flickering light had come to fill up the wordlessness and stillness that surrounded them. It made all three of them feel easier, all three of them feel guilty.
And tonight, Claire was again glad of the constant noise, the false focus to the room. Ever since she had arrived, her mother had been flicking her sidelong questioning glances, and she knew it was only a matter of time before the actual questions started. After dinner, Claire installed herself on the sofa, remained resolutely in profile, pretending to be engrossed in the news.
She knew there was washing up to be done, but if she was cornered in the kitchen there would be no way to avoid her mother’s gently persistent enquiries.
“Mum, leave it. I’ll do it in the morning.”
“You could give me a hand now.”
“I want to see the news.”
Belfast was on TV. A half-filled debating chamber, a glowing digital clock, the minutes ticking by. Angry laughter and polite fury. Then cut to elsewhere. She recognised the brownbrick building near the bus station. Square spectacles, a boiled, thin-eyed face, and clustering around him, men familiar from local news back in Belfast. The one who looked like Mr. Burns from The Simpsons, the brushy sergeant-major type, the swelling spreading Jabba-jawed one. Claire could never remember their names. All of them with narrow smiles. They would not be taking their seats.
In Belfast she had never felt entitled to an opinion. Now, across the water, she felt a sympathetic ache for the city. Things had faltered, halted, broken down. She felt a sudden urge to go back, to be there. Not to have run away.
“It’ll only take a minute.”
“I’m tired.”
She was tired. Her stomach was full of roast potatoes and casserole, the fire was hot and her face had started to glow. She felt shivery.
“I’ll do it in the morning. I’m knackered, honestly. I think I’ll just head on up to bed.”
Claire lay in bed underneath the uncurtained skylight. Darkness had not yet fallen, and tonight, there would be no stars. The sky was covered with a thick grey crust of cloud. The rain picked up soot from the chimney smoke, and left streaky dark marks down the sloping glass. She pulled her duvet up to her chin, rolled onto her side, closed her eyes. She did not want to look around the room again. It was not as clear as she’d remembered it.
When she stuffed her bag in the wardrobe, she had noticed the few forgotten clothes left there: her school tie and skirt hung next to the overcoat Alan had hated so much, which was on the same hanger as a top she’d borrowed from Jen and never got round to giving back. The bookshelves were incoherent too: they rambled. Ape and Essence sat between Fantastic Mr. Fox and The Magician’s Nephew, and she couldn’t remember what it was about. There was a Bunty Annual for 1968, A History of The English Language, a copy of Romola that she knew she’d never finished, a pop-up version of Jack and the Beanstalk and Beowulf in the original. She’d seen them: she didn’t want to look again. The room was wrong, it was misleading. It was full of anachronisms.