by Jo Baker
She pushed open the gate and followed the stippled concrete path around the side of the house. Damp tips of ferns and iris blades brushed against her legs. She opened the back door and, as always, the latch scraped noisily against the metal plate. The sound was ugly and comforting. She pulled off her muddy shoes and left them by the door. She ran a glass of water from the tap. A faint scent of geraniums and grass. Peat water. It had seeped through the ground that she had walked that day. It had welled darkly into a pool, spilled into a beck, tumbled brown and frothing down the hill. It was, for Claire, the taste of earth and home. She drank again, inverted the empty glass on the draining board, walked slowly upstairs in her damp socks.
Still she couldn’t settle. Calves aching, toes burning with blisters, she moved quietly around the room, opening cupboards, pulling out drawers, lifting books off the shelves, putting them back. Then down the stairs again, knowing which treads would creak, placing her feet on the outmost edges of the boards. She didn’t want to be heard and she wanted to be heard. When her father had fallen ill and the house and the night and the world had for the first time seemed empty, she had cried insistently and quietly every night for hours, alone in her room. Quietly, so that she could be heard only if someone really wanted to hear. And her mother, eyes open staring at the ceiling, had been so muffled up in her own misery that she had never heard a sound. Now Claire paced damp-footed through the house, through the living room, the dining room, the kitchen, back again, past the dark open doorway of her parents’ room, hoping they were asleep, waiting to be noticed.
Her mother had never noticed, Claire thought, because from the moment of her father’s illness, she had refused to recognise any weakness. Claire had to be strong, they had to stick together. They had to do it for him. There was not, really, any choice. Well, Claire thought, she had been strong, she had stuck together. And she had done it for them. She had done it because she had thought she and her mother were a partnership, that they were in it together, and that they were equal. And all the time her mother had been lying to her.
And what was most infuriating was that she knew what would happen. She knew that nothing would be explained, that when it came down to it, nothing would be resolved. Claire would be obliged to be understanding, and to be strong, and not to make a fuss. For his sake. She would be obliged to forgive her mother, even though rage and grief would still be eating away at the lining of her gut. And nothing more would be said. They would pretend it had never happened. So when would she get the chance, Claire wondered. When would she get her chance to be weak, to let them down, to be unreasonable, to be a teenager, to scream and shout and tear the house down?
She squatted down in front of the TV, switched it on. Flickering blue light and adverts for chatlines and catalogues and cheap holidays. Blue seas and white teeth and long slender legs. She turned down the sound, stood up, walked to the window. She stared out at the trees. A wind had gathered. Leaves and moonshadows fluttered. She looked down at her hands, arched on the cracked and bubbled windowsill. Thin skin, piano-wire tendons and bluish veins. She thought of Jen and the glasses and the pale lines across the ball of her thumb, and underneath the damp cotton of her trousers, her own tracery of scars seemed to sing at her through closed lips. She cocked her head to listen to the silence of the house. She heard the soft creak of timbers cooling; outside, branches grated against each other in the wind. Apart from that, nothing. No animal sounds. It was an empty night; uninhabited. But even so, she could not cut, not here. It would go wrong. The bathroom was carpeted; there would be bloodstains. At any moment her mother might stir, wake, and come padding down the corridor and knock on the bathroom door. But wasn’t that, after all, Claire thought, what she wanted? Wasn’t that what she was listening for every time she brought the blade to her skin and began to carve? The footfall in the hallway, the soft tap on the door, a gently insistent voice demanding to be let in. Wasn’t that what she was waiting for? Wasn’t that why she did it?
She paced back across the room, climbed the stairs. They creaked underneath her. She switched on her bedroom light and sat down on the edge of her bed. She looked blankly at the white formica wardrobe door. Then she was on her feet again, pacing across the landing, back down the stairs again, each tread creaking underneath her. She walked through the dark rooms, through the flickering light of the silent TV set, through the moving shadow-branches on the carpet. She found herself come to a halt outside her parents’ open bedroom door. She listened to the frightening ebb and flow of her father’s breath.
“Claire?”
She was propped up on an elbow.
“Mum.”
“Can’t sleep?”
Claire looked at her a moment, but couldn’t think what to say. She turned and walked away, back through the dining room, back into the kitchen. She heard the bedclothes rustling back, heard her mother’s feet on the floor. Heard her urgent whisper: “Claire—” but just kept on walking.
“Claire—”
She came up to the kitchen door. The door was still unlocked, the key still slotted into the keyhole. Through the glass panel she could see across the valley. Brilliant moonlight picked out, briefly, the tracery of lines and mounds and hollows. Cloud shadows scudded across the silvered grass.
“Claire—”
She reached out for the doorhandle.
“Claire!”
Her mother’s hand was on her hand. There was broderie anglaise on the cuff of her nightdress.
“What?” Claire said.
“Where are you going?”
Claire couldn’t turn round to look at her. She felt her sleep-soured breath on her neck. They stood in silence, too close.
“Are you going?” her mother asked.
Claire just stared at the old hand on hers, the dark softened skin.
“Claire.”
Claire pulled her hand away.
“Love—”
“What?”
“Talk to me.”
“About what?”
“I’m worried.”
“Really.”
“Claire.”
“Well, what do you want me to say?”
The old hand was lifted away from the doorhandle, but she was still there, close, fervent, just behind her. Claire slid away, walked across the kitchen, putting the table between them.
“I want us to talk,” her mother said.
“So you said.”
“What’s the matter, love?”
“What do you mean, what’s the matter?”
“I mean, since I have to spell it out, what was it that made you think it would be okay to stay out all day and half of the night without telling us where you were going. You worried your father and me half to death.”
“Oh, so it’s all my fault now?”
“Claire, love—”
“Don’t.”
“Don’t what?”
“Don’t make this my fault. You lied to me,” Claire said. There it was. Out. She could almost see the words, scrawled in sparkler-writing across the air between them.
“Claire.”
Claire raised her eyebrows, wouldn’t speak. Her heart seemed to have swollen up; it was choking her.
“Claire, you’ve got to try and understand …”
“No. Bollocks. I don’t have to try and understand. I’m sick to death of understanding. I’ve had enough. You lied to me. You lied to me and you couldn’t remember what you’d said. You slipped up, I caught you. No one would forget the truth like that. One way or another, you lied, and you kept on lying until I found you out. That’s it. That’s all there is to it. There’s nothing else to say.”
“Claire, listen, please.”
“Why? Why should I?”
“I want to explain. I want you to try and understand.”
“Why the fuck should I?”
“Darling, your father—”
Claire clenched her fist on the tabletop, her nails digging into her palm. Already she was in the wrong. Alre
ady this was about her behaviour and not about her mother’s. Her eyes narrowed. She dropped her voice to a whisper. She wouldn’t wake him. Of course she wouldn’t wake him.
“You’ve been lying to me for years,” Claire said. “How can you stand there and expect me to swallow any more? You have no fucking clue who those people are, do you? You made the whole thing up.”
“It’s not like that.”
“What is it like, then?”
Her mother’s dark eyes were luminous. The creases round her eyes and the lines on her forehead were clear. Her throat looked pouchy and soft, marsupial. Claire realised suddenly that she had never seen her mother cry. She wanted to pull her close, to dig her nails into her, to shake her.
“Well?”
Her mother drew a chair back from the kitchen table. She sat down, facing Claire across the formica tabletop. “They’re mine,” she said. “The photographs. They’re mine.”
“Right.”
“I inherited them. When Ray and Fran died.”
“So it’s still all bullshit you’ve been telling me. All fucking bullshit. They’re Ray and Fran’s photos. They’re your adoptive family.”
“No. They’re mine. Don’t look a bit like Ray and Fran’s lot.”
“Why should I believe you? You lied to me before.”
“You were just a baby. I wanted the best for you.”
“You made the stories up. Every last one of them. You had no idea who those people were.”
“No. They are mine. I know they’re mine. But that’s all I know for certain. They didn’t believe in keeping things, back then—they didn’t believe in remembering—” She folded her hands on her lap, she looked down at them, watched as she twisted them together. “Best forgotten, that’s what they said—maybe they were right—trying to hold onto it—” she hesitated a moment, swallowed. “Anyway,” she continued, “I was luckier than most. Some things had come with me; from the children’s home, from before the children’s home. A few clothes, and the album.”
She looked up at Claire. Claire gritted her teeth. Her mother went on.
“I found them all together. In an old trunk. We were clearing the house after Fran died. I was so angry. I can’t tell you how angry I was. You think you’re angry with me, but can you imagine—” She looked down at her hands again, shook her head. “Ray and Fran had been all the family I’d ever had. And, you know, even then I’d never felt like I belonged. I’d always looked different. And then I saw these photographs. People who looked like me. Who looked at me, it felt like. Ray and Fran, they’d kept the photos from me. They’d kept my family from me. And now they were gone, too. I couldn’t even tell them how angry I was. And, you see, they must have known something, how else would they have got hold of the album. Someone must have passed it on to them, told them something. Someone must have wanted me to have it. But by then it was too late to ask. I felt as if I’d lost everyone. Forever.” She stopped wringing her hands. She looked up at Claire.
“Babies are born with blue eyes. Kind of misty blue. But even when you were very little, almost from the day you were born, you had my eyes. Even through the misty blue I could see you had the same eyes as all the people in the photographs. You belonged. You were suddenly, really family. I realised that I hadn’t lost everyone. Not forever. There was you, and you were one of us, and we were a family. So I told you the stories. I wanted you to know that you belonged. I wanted you to have what I could never have.”
Claire felt her skin bristle. She wouldn’t be persuaded. She wouldn’t understand. And she wouldn’t be blamed for it.
“That’s bullshit. You weren’t doing it for me. You did it for yourself.”
Her mother hugged her arms around herself, thought for a moment.
“Maybe,” she said.
“You told me they were Jewish. You made that up. Admit it. You can’t have known that. And Sam and Ben and Granddad and Great Uncle Sid and Aunty May: you made them up, too. You made me believe in them and they never even existed.”
Claire felt her eyes fill again. They had been snatched away from her. They had been wiped out. It was her mother’s fault. She had done it.
“They are real. Somehow, I’m sure that they’re real. I must have had a family.”
“But you made them up.” Claire’s voice was rising. She knew it was, but couldn’t stop it. “Those people, those stories, they were never real. That’s all there is to it.”
“Claire—”
“You lied to yourself to make yourself feel better. And then you lied to me.”
“You have to try and understand, Claire—”
“Ah, but that’s just it,” Claire said. “In fact, I don’t.”
Claire moved around the side of the kitchen table, towards the door. She reached out for the handle, turned it.
“Love, please, don’t—”
“Why not?” said Claire. She found that she was crying. She wiped the back of her hand angrily across her eyes, sniffed noisily. She pulled the door open, the latch grating against the metal plate. “Why shouldn’t I?”
“Because I miss you.”
“Bullshit.”
“It’s true. I miss you. And I worry.”
Her voice sounded strange, thick. Claire glanced back at her. She could only see the back of her head, the grey hair silvery in the moonlight. She was leaning over the table, looking down at the scuffed surface. She was tracing a scar across the tabletop with her forefinger. Then she looked round at Claire. Her eyes were swollen. Her face was crumpled, sore-looking. It was wet. She sniffed, wiped the back of a hand across her eyes, and looked suddenly, incredibly young. And something in Claire expanded, gave.
“It didn’t help, you know,” she said, reluctantly. “Those stories. That identity. Didn’t help at all.”
As she watched, the creases on the older woman’s face deepened. She shook her head slightly. Claire dropped her hand from the doorhandle, came over to the table, sat down. She reached out a hand across the formica, halfway.
“There must be something,” she said. “There must be some records left, still. You could try and find out.”
Her mother rubbed at her eyes, kept her hands over them, nodded.
“I could help you.”
Claire scraped back her chair, slipped round the table, and let her hand rest, gently, on her mother’s shoulder. Then she crossed the room, lifted the kettle, filled it at the tap. Setting down mugs, turning to fetch milk from the fridge, and standing for a moment, just looking at the brushed steel of the kettle, she couldn’t help but wonder if the truth would be any better, any more help than her mother’s stories, just because it was the truth.
TEN
Mechanical cranes hung over the city streets like mothers over children, carefully putting things in order, setting things to rights. The Seacat, sliding into its berth, drew past the ends of canyon-streets, past office windows, past shopfronts and car-parks. It seemed to be sailing straight into the city. It seemed to be sailing up a street. Claire saw the gasometer-barrel of the Waterfront, the squat green dome of the City Hall, the distant glow of the Europa’s neon sign. Unexpected perspectives, new distances and juxtapositions. She realised for the first time how close everything was, how close it was to everything else. She hadn’t noticed until that moment the straight, obvious lines that linked each of her landmarks, that laced them all together. And now, at the end of almost every street, a crane stooped, Meccano-frail, transparent against the sky. Putting things together, setting things to rights.
As the Seacat slid past the quayside buildings, Claire glimpsed pale expensive offices, suited workers. People who tapped on keyboards, poured coffee from filter-jugs, leant against desks to flirt. On the pavement below, a woman in a red-white-and-blue Kangol jacket was pushing a buggy with one hand, trailing a toddler from the other. Traffic streamed around a bend. The lights changed, the traffic lined patiently up, bunching together, and a new flow of cars swept past, dispersing, spilling out across th
e lanes. She saw the flashing lights of an ambulance, heard the wailing siren, and watched as the cars slid in towards the kerb, stopped, and the ambulance slipped past them and away. It looked natural, it looked balletic; it was almost beautiful. And she wondered, for the first time, who all these people were, and what they did, and where they were coming from, and where they were going to.
“Excuse me—”
A uniformed woman stood near her, holding open a grey plastic binliner. She nodded to the empty cellophane wrappers, the dry plastic coffee cup on the tray-table. Bright hazel eyes, kohl-lined. Claire recognised her. She had worked on the trip over. She was the one Claire had spoken to, before running off to throw up. Claire smiled up at her, knowing she would not be remembered.
“Have you finished?”
“Yes. Thank you.” Claire swept the debris into the binliner.
They had gone to Helen’s Bay. They had taken the train. It was three carriages long. The seats were bright blue. The track ran between houses, hedges, then alongside the smooth blue lough. Grainne, released from school for Easter, was like a little girl, all smiles, head turning to look out of the windows on either side of the carriage. She leaned forward every few minutes to offer Claire her open packet of Milky Way Stars. Grainne’s mum and dad ran a newsagent’s in Armagh. She always had a packet of sweeties on the go. When she yawned you could see her fillings.
“This is us,” and Grainne was on her feet, at the doors, stuffing her sweet packet into her coat pocket, hand on the “open” button before the train had even stopped.
It was a brilliant, blustery April Sunday. Low sun, the wind chasing clouds across the sky, wringing out sudden spatterings of rain. The sand was perfect, rich, marked only by a few booted prints, dogtracks and the delicate patterning of birds’ feet. The water’s surface was mottled with cloud-shadows and sun. Ahead, it frothed against sharp black rocks. The sand was strewn with blue and silver mussel shells, kelp, and limpet husks worn away to pale translucent quoits.