by Jo Baker
“Love you,” he said.
Claire’s eyes were still smarting with shampoo. Her hair was slick with it. She leaned against the cold tiles, rubbing her eyes, trying not to gag, listening to his wet feet slap against the lino as he headed for the door. She stepped back into the water, rinsed her hair, rubbed her eyes. She took mouthfuls of hot water and spat, rinsing away the taste of soap and spit. Then she reached out for the shower-control and turned it up as hot as it would go. She would wash herself clean. She would wash away every scrap of the stuff that was trickling down her, creeping down towards her public hair. She would not let it get inside her. She would flush it down the drain, be rid of it. She turned in the stream of scalding water, arching herself forward so that the water washed over her belly. She wouldn’t even have to touch it: it would rinse away, then she would pick up the soap and scrub herself all over, wash herself cleaner than clean. She glanced down at her belly, expecting to see it smooth and flat and clear. But his semen was still there. It had coagulated in the hot water, curdled into strands and soft translucent crumbs. It was sticking to her skin. It looked like scrambled eggs. She gagged, tasted stomach acid in her mouth.
She picked up the nailbrush, scrubbed at the clinging threads, tried to scrape them away. Her skin came up red, hatched and cross-hatched by the bristles.
“What are you doing?”
She had thought he had gone. She froze.
“Claire?”
What had he seen?
“Claire?”
Had the shower curtain covered her, or had he seen her gag, seen her scrubbing him away?
“Just washing,” she said.
She heard his feet again on the wet lino. He tugged the shower curtain back. She saw him look her over. The hot water now stung her skin, dilating capillaries, dragging blood to the surface. She had scraped bright pink weals across her stomach. She had scrubbed herself raw, and yet there were still crumbs of his come stuck to her. She could not cover herself. She couldn’t speak. There was nothing she could do.
“You’ve hurt yourself,” he said.
She looked down at his bare feet on the dirty white lino, the fake tiles marked across the bathroom floor.
“I’m sorry,” she said.
“Why did you hurt yourself?”
“It’s nothing.”
“You’ve all but scrubbed your skin off. You must have felt pretty dirty to scrub yourself that hard.”
“I’m sorry.”
He looked her up and down again, his face red and puckered. He too seemed unable to speak, unable to find adequate words. She could almost see, in the workings of his face, his desperate rummage for the right vocabulary. He gave up. He reached forward, almost slowly, and placed a hand on her chest, between her breasts. For a moment, she thought it was a caress, and was about to reach for him, when he pushed her.
He didn’t push her hard; he pushed her hardly at all, in fact. It certainly wasn’t anything as dramatic and final as a punch, or even a slap. It wasn’t something you could really hold against him, when it came down to it. If Claire hadn’t been scrubbing herself so vigorously and made the bath slippery with soap, she would probably not have fallen. And her razors had retractable blades. If she had remembered to click them back after she had shaved herself, she wouldn’t have got cut. As it was, he pushed her slightly and she lost her footing and slipped, cracking her head against the wall, putting a hand out to save herself and putting it straight down on top of her razor. Slicing herself on its twin blades.
There was a lot of blood. More than when she cut herself deliberately. Claire was aware of the blood, and a throb in her head which crystallised immediately into pain, and a vague smarting from her hand. And feeling suddenly, utterly bewildered. And lying in the bath, water running over her, and being all angles and joints, one hand held in the air, red streaming brightly down her arm, and slipping and slithering as she tried to dislodge herself, to get herself upright, and feeling as if she never would, and, absurdly, giggling.
And Alan standing back from her, looking down at her as she floundered in the empty bath like a beached starfish. Blank and pale. Tears pouring down his face.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
He reached out a hand towards her, grabbed her wrist. It anchored her. He helped her sit up, then stand. He held her arm as she stepped out of the bath. He steered her over to the basin and turned the cold tap on. He held her hand under the cold water. The cut stung. Claire pulled away, but he held on. The water ran clear. He dried her hand then wrapped it up in toilet roll. There were tears on his face. He sniffed back the gathering mucus. He took off his towel and wrapped it round her. Naked, he put an arm around her and guided her through to the bedroom. He sat her down on the bed, pulled the blanket round her shoulders.
“Warm enough?”
“Yes.”
He pulled on his underpants, stepped into his trousers. He paused, holding them up by the waistband.
“I didn’t know,” he said.
Claire looked up at him.
“I didn’t know that you felt like that.”
She drew her lips back in against her teeth.
“You could have told me,” he said. “You should have told me.” He zipped up his fly.
“I’m sorry.”
“How long have you felt like that?”
She screwed her eyes shut.
“Have you always felt like that?”
She swallowed.
“You should have told me. Why didn’t you tell me? I’m not a complete bastard.”
“I—”
“Didn’t want to hurt me? How do you think I feel now?”
She opened her eyes, but couldn’t look up at him. The bathtowel was in a heap on the floor. It was green. It needed washing. She opened her mouth.
“I—”
He stood in silence a moment, waiting for her to finish. She folded her lips back in, unable to.
“You think I’m a complete bastard. You must,” he said. “Do you really think I’d’ve done that if I’d known how you felt? I wouldn’t have touched you. I wouldn’t have gone near you. How could you let me do that?”
“I’m sorry.”
She glanced up at him. He looked at her for a long moment, then bent to pull on his shoes.
“I’ll go get some plasters.”
She watched him tie his shoe laces. He stood up, pulled a jumper over his head.
“What should I do?” she asked.
“Hold that hand up above your head. It’ll slow down the bleeding.”
“I mean—”
He was gone. She heard the door fall shut behind him, then, a moment later, the street door. She sat on the edge of the bed. Her skin goosepimpled in the cold. He was gone and it was over. Her throat ached, swelled, and she began quietly to cry.
Slowly, one-handed, she dragged her bags out of the corner of the room, unzipped the largest. She pulled out her black trousers, her white shirt, pants and bra. Slowly, she dressed, then slowly tied on her shoes. She unzipped the smallest of her bags, and emptied it, piling the books it had contained on the floor around her. The blood had begun to seep through the tissue; she held her arm above her head and used her left hand to pull a few clothes out of the largest bag and stuff them into the smallest. She took two changes of clothes, some underwear, socks, make-up, a couple of books. Not much, just what she could carry, just what she could leave in the staff room at work without it being noticeable. She zipped up the other bags, pushed them back into the corner. Out of Alan’s way. She went through to the bathroom, unwound the tissue, flushed it away. She took another wad of paper, held it against the cut. She blew her nose, wiped her eyes, looked at herself in the mirror. Mess. Complete fucking mess.
She placed her keys on the kitchen table, hefted her bag onto her shoulder, cast around her. Nothing else she should do before she left. Nothing else she could think of, anyway. Outside the door the streets branched and forked and crossed and merged and tangled, and alo
ng each street were houses, shops, bars, cafés and offices. Moving through the streets were people who knew where they were going and who would be waiting for them when they got there and what they would say and how they would feel and she didn’t fit into any of that. Didn’t have as much as a toehold in anyone else’s life. There wasn’t even a crack between the pavingstones that she could slip down. There was no one to go to. There was nowhere to go. Apart from to work, of course. She had to go to work. Because of course they couldn’t manage without her. The whole place would grind to a halt if she stopped emptying ashtrays. She stepped out of the flat, into the communal hallway. Daylight falling through the dusty fanlight. Fliers and junkmail scattered on the carpet. She stepped over the litter, reached out a hand towards the street door. She turned the lock, the handle, and dragged it open.
“Oh.” Alan was standing on the doorstep, key in hand. “You’re leaving.”
“I … Yes.”
“I got you the plasters.”
“Right.”
He reached into his pocket and pulled out a cardboard wallet. He opened it clumsily, hastily. He pulled out a plaster. Claire lifted off the wad of tissue and held out her hand. The cut was red, welling up. He peeled off the paper backing, stuck the plaster down on her cut. Gently. He looked at her.
“That won’t last long. Take the rest of them.” He handed her the box.
“Thanks.”
“Where will you go?”
“Work.”
“After that?”
“I don’t know.”
“Right.”
“I’d better go. I’ll be late.”
“What about your stuff? Won’t you be needing it?”
“I’ll come back for it. Sometime.”
“Right.”
She hitched her bag up her shoulder, looked down at the plaster. Blood had already begun to seep through, turning the fabric brown. She looked up at him. His face was pale, his eyes red and wet-looking.
“I’m sorry,” she said.
“Yes,” he said. “Me too.”
“Yes. Well. See you.”
“See you.”
And she slipped past him, turned down Wolseley Street. She didn’t hear the door close. He must have still been standing there, watching her walk away, as she turned the corner onto Cromwell Road. Out of sight, she hugged her arms around her. She felt her face glow. February air; cold and dry, and the city emptying around her.
Claire didn’t see Grainne and Paul come in. She was in a daze, threading her way through the crowds, collecting empty glasses, when there was suddenly a hand on her arm. She swung round, heart pounding, but it was Grainne. Grainne smiled, stepped forward, and hugged her. Claire clutched her glasses awkwardly to her chest, staring up over Grainne’s neat black shoulder.
“I heard,” Grainne said, stepping away, looking Claire seriously in the eyes.
“Ah.”
“I just wanted to say, if you need anything. Anything at all.”
“Right. Thanks.”
“There’s a spare room at my place. You can stay with me. Long as you want.”
NINE
A cold white room. Rising steam, grey-blue greasy hot water. A blue-painted wooden lid propped back against the wall. She leant over the edge of the copper, holding onto the smooth wood of the paddle handle.
You could hide a child in there, someone said. You could boil a child alive.
And that was it. After that, cold, echoing voices, and the guilty sense of something left carelessly behind. A long white room. The girl in the next bed had plaits and smelt warm and musty. She cried all night. Snuffling and yelping and hiccuping: Anne heard her as she lay awake. Anne was a good girl, and did not cry. Because no one wanted little girls who cried.
And then Ray and Fran’s house, with the white-flowered tree, and no other little girls at all. Because she had been a good girl, and never cried. And she couldn’t help but wonder about the girl in the next bed and if they cured her of crying, and although the sense of something missing never left her, she didn’t try to remember what she had lost. Because, as Fran said, that was gone now, and best forgotten.
Beside her, propped up on pillows, Joseph lay sleeping. His face was smooth, his breath came evenly. While Anne slept his breathing permeated her dreams. When she woke, it was the first thing she became aware of; before the light, before the buzzing of the alarm clock, before the winter-morning cold. His breath was as necessary and insistent as the ticking of a clock.
In the hospital she had often fallen asleep by his bed, her forehead flat on the cool thick sheets, lullabied by the familiar soothing sound of his breath. It was not him breathing, they had told her, but she had always known that they were wrong. There could be no question about it. This was the gentle, ceaseless sigh that had drifted through her dreams for the past fourteen years. It was his strong lungs that made the sheet rise and fall. He sucked the air out of the ventilator.
And now, when she lay awake at night, she still listened to his breath. It never faltered, never hesitated, but she listened always and intently for the slightest indication of a change. She had been adamant with the doctors, she had been stubborn with the nurses. She had determinedly refused to listen, but they had nonetheless planted the seed of a doubt. She had to keep on checking, she had to keep on assuring herself that it was him, and that he was breathing.
As she lay awake listening, Anne watched the tree-shadows, the branches jostling and shifting across the ceiling. A windy night, she thought, and so a brighter day tomorrow. And a bright moon, though cut across by clouds. Clouds scudding across the sky, driven by the wind. A wild night, and so a brighter day tomorrow.
She knew Claire was awake. She had heard the scrape of the latch as she opened the door. She had listened to the water rattle through the pipes, the footsteps climbing up the stairs. Her bed had creaked as she sat down, the floorboards had shifted and moaned as she walked around her room. She heard her cross the landing, come back down the stairs again. Heard the tangle of voices when the television was switched on, then silence as it was switched off again, or the volume was turned down. Doors opened and closed as she moved around the house. Then footsteps back up the stairs, movement above. Overhead, the bed creaked again.
Anne couldn’t let her go. In her mind she followed her daughter’s every step. She saw the worn patch on the carpet she was walking over, the way the shadows fell behind the furniture. As she heard the click of each light switch, she could almost feel the smooth plastic underneath her daughter’s fingertips.
It was worse when Claire was in Belfast. Attenuated by distance, her mind strained towards her daughter across the dark. As if she could find her and wrap her up in her awareness, as if she could make her safe. Eyes open, she tried to thread her way around the unknown city, to follow her daughter through the crowded bars, to see her safely home through dark and risky streets, to watch her fall asleep beside that lumpen boy. While Claire was home, it was easier to chart her movements, to see what she was seeing. What she could not follow were her thoughts.
She had told Claire: “There’s nothing round here for you.” She had told her it again and again that summer after Claire had finished her degree. Like an English-speaker abroad, Anne had kept on saying it, louder and louder, as if repetition and amplification could make the meaning clear. It had taken Claire leaving to make Anne understand what she was saying, what Claire had heard. “There’s nothing round here for you,” meant to Claire, “We don’t want you anymore.” It didn’t mean half the things Anne had wanted it to mean. And now it seemed too late to go back and explain. It seemed graceless to peel away that much misunderstanding. So Anne lay awake listening, stretching herself out through the house, waiting.
Because something would have to be done soon. Something graceless and muddled. Now that Claire knew, or was beginning to know, Anne had started to scrape away the layers and look back beyond her stories. She had to find something to tell her daughter, something that would
hold her. A new straight clean line that she could pull out from the knotty mess of ideas. And all that she could find was a memory of steam, a cold room, and dirty water, and a voice that said You could hide a child in there; you could boil a child alive. And that wasn’t enough. And with every passing second, the risk of her child slinging her bag on her shoulder and walking away again grew, swelling in Anne’s brain like an aneurysm. She wanted to climb out of bed, to push her way through the silences, through to her daughter, to cram her to her chest and claim her.
She had sat over her husband’s smoothed-out sheets, dry-eyed. Smiling for her daughter, rational and resolute with the staff. In childbirth she had been quiet, apologetic for the noise and mess. When they had buried Moss underneath the willow tree, she had held Joseph’s head in her hands as he shook with tears. It was years since she had cremated her adoptive parents’ bodies and buried the ashes, but she still had not cried for them. Years before that, a silent, dry-eyed child had been handed over to them. A silent child had lain awake in the long white dormitory, listening to the nightsounds. A silent child had peered nervously into the copper and heard those words: You could hide a child in there; you could boil a child alive. Grown, the silence had grown with her, suffocating. She wanted to rage, to shout, to howl apart the darkness. She missed them. She missed them and they didn’t know. She wanted to scream it out so loud that they could not help but hear. Joseph. Her baby. Ray and Fran. Those unknown familiar people whose images filled her photograph album. And the young woman who sat in the dark in another room, who was always moving further and further away.
Claire had walked. All day, all evening, she had walked. She walked along the riverbank, sat on the damp earth a while and watched the water purl over the stones, then got up and walked on. She had climbed up to the limestone pavements on the top of Rise Hill and looked down at the flat surface of the reservoir, then followed the same path back down the fell again. She was exhausted, couldn’t stay in one place, couldn’t decide where to go. She kept on tracing the old paths that looped out from the village then swung back in again. The drink had gradually cleared from her head. It left behind a sedimental ache and a bitter taste in her mouth. The path brought her eventually back home. As she climbed the field-wall, picking her way carefully down the grannies’ teeth steps onto the road, she could hardly see her feet in the dusk. She looked up towards the house. The windowpanes reflected back the night. Her parents were in bed.