by Ajay Close
‘Before I forget, darling—’
She reached down for a cream cartridge-paper bag with the name of an unfamiliar store woven into its ribbon handles. I made ready to admire another present to herself.
‘I bought you a little something.’
She had faultless timing, have I mentioned that?
‘Why?’
She gave me her amused-indulgent look – does there have to be a reason? – and I felt the helplessness that overcame me whenever Lilias displayed anything construable as affection.
‘You didn’t need to.’
‘I know I didn’t need to.’ She leaned towards me, lowering her voice as if sharing a secret. ‘I wanted to.’
As I broke the monogrammed sticker sealing the bag I guessed what was inside. Every Christmas without fail she gave me five tissue-wrapped Bronnley lemon soaps. As a child I had loved their Anna Neagle-ish whiff of post-war London. She’d kept three in her green theatrical trunk along with all her old programmes bound in pink ribbon, a tin of Crowe’s Cremine, and several fluff-furred sticks of Leichner No 9. Tempted by the mimetic shape and scent, not so very different from the smell of sherbet lemons, I had actually licked one of these soaps. Not a mistake I made twice. But that was thirty-odd years ago. So why did she persist? Laziness? A coded attempt to civilise me? Or was it a reference to a moment in the past when I had actually approximated the child she wanted? This remote possibility was the reason I could never tell her I had accumulated close to a hundred Bronnley lemon soaps in a bin bag at the back of the hall cupboard. I’d used them as drawer-fresheners for years until I worked out the connection between my anomie in the mornings and the fact that all my underwear smelled of Lilias.
I lifted the bag to my nose and inhaled. ‘Thank you, Ma.’
‘To tide you over until Christmas,’ she said.
The presents I chose for her were a little more ingenious, but not much. Each December I bought the ghost-written memoirs of some awful old ham. Whatever the cover price, there was a cheapness about these books: the jaunty title (as often as not, the catchphrase of a 1970s television sitcom); the flashlit black-and-white photographs of the subject standing next to a glassy-eyed theatrical knight, or shaking hands with Jim Callaghan, or peering down Diana Dors’ cleavage; the blurred print on substandard paper; the way the pages fell out when the spine was cracked. With the books I gave Lilias this didn’t tend to happen, so I knew she never read them, but she had fifteen minutes of pleasure looking herself up in the index.
For a few moments we stared at each other across the tablecloth. Lilias’s silences were almost always a cue, but this one felt empty, and full, and frightening, a pause that neither of us controlled.
A rhythmic chanting from the march carried through the open window.
‘I nearly married a farmer,’ she said.
She collected proposals. Architect, doctor, concert pianist, racehorse trainer, hotel manager (a wee bit below her usual standard, but it was a five-star hotel). Now I had to add a farmer to the list.
‘What went wrong?’
‘He was a farmer, darling.’
‘He must have thought he was in with a chance.’
‘He was very good-looking.’ She traced the pattern of the damask tablecloth with the tip of her ring finger, a familiar piece of stagecraft. I prepared myself for the usual story of extravagant devotion, the broken engagement to another woman. She made the breath catch in the back of her throat. ‘Very cruel, country people.’
The waiter returned with my change. I thought how seldom Lilias had given me anything outside Christmas and birthdays. I wanted to reciprocate in some way.
‘I’ve something to tell you.’
She was watching herself in the mirrored wall and took a moment to adjust her gaze.
‘Frankie and I have been trying for a baby.’
She sparkled her eyes in congratulation. I ploughed on.
‘But we don’t seem to be getting anywhere, so we’re going to look at this place that does assisted conception.’
The sparkle faded. Oddly for a woman who had made a career out of artifice, she disapproved of tampering with nature. Botox, eye-lifts, tummy tucks, test-tube babies. There was a moral difference between making the best of oneself and loading the dice.
Opening her handbag, she took out her powder compact and used the mirror to retouch her lipstick, bringing her lips together with a faint practised smack. After inspecting the result, she closed the bag and, demonstrating once again her genius for the coup de théâtre, said,
‘Darling, I’ve got cancer.’
I made the five o’clock train back to Glasgow with seconds to spare. It was drawing away from the platform before I’d sat down. The carriage was packed with commuters and shoppers, an obstacle course of laptops and Harvey Nichols bags along the aisle. One seat left, at a table. I took out some paperwork. In the seat next to mine a small girl was fiddling with a device which emitted continuous electronic arpeggios. I put the file back in my case.
On the other side of the table, the mother gave me a rueful grin. Twenty-five going on forty. Tired, too thin, doing her best, smelling of the detergent the clapped-out machine no longer rinsed from her clothes. I was surprised she could afford the peak-rate fares. In the window seat beside her was a child of uncertain age, toddler-size but lacking a toddler’s doughy features: a perfectly-proportioned wee man. He was sleeping, not the way adults sleep on trains – head lolling, body still defended – but wholly abandoned, deep in his dreams. His mother watched over him, and I watched with her, noticing the long lashes at rest on his pale cheek, a faint rosy tinge around the delicate nostrils, the translucent curl of his one exposed ear. His mouth was more taupe than pink, with a shallow scoop in the upper lip. I too had the urge to run a fingertip down his nose, tracing the line of that heartbreaking profile. He stirred, twitching away his mother’s touch, burrowing deeper into the dusty plush. She caught my eye, biting her lip in mock-remorse, her pinched face flooding with tenderness, and I thought: there is nothing I wouldn’t give to change places with you.
1972
That first morning Lili rises early, tiptoeing past the kitchen where Mrs S is clanging pans on the Rayburn, cooking pigs’ blood or salty porridge or whatever they have for breakfast on a farm. Life could be worse. She could be in Edinburgh, tucking a cryptic note under Brod’s windscreen wipers, some grubby little private dick breathing down her neck. This way, he’ll get his divorce without being taken to the cleaners, and the next time she sets foot in George Street she’ll be as svelte as the day she left. And absence makes the cock grow fonder. Meanwhile, it’s cheap here, and anonymous, and Mrs S shows no inclination to chat, thank God. (Lili could never befriend a woman who sits down to dinner in a pinnie and wellingtons.) Eggs from the henhouse. Butter from the churn. Three meals a day cooked by someone else.
But what the hell is she supposed to do with herself?
The turf-scented breeze is a godsend after the farmhouse smell of coal fires and last night’s stewed meat. She can’t risk the yard in case she’s seen from the kitchen, so she goes the other way, round the corner, between the dairy and the grassy triangle of paddock ruled by Ronnie the chestnut gelding. A shaven coat with the gloss of polished rosewood, his mane and tail blueish-black, a white star on his forehead like a promise of sweetness, the effect rather ruined by his tobacco-brown teeth.
Showing Lili around the farm yesterday, Mrs S addressed him as a naughty boy she really shouldn’t indulge, passing by the paddock with a couple of Victory Vs in her pocket, but who could resist? It was hard to reconcile her coochy-coochy tone with the malign presence in the three-sided field. (Not to mention the presence of his enormous purple erection.) He kept shaking his head. To get rid of the flies, Mrs S said, but there weren’t any flies, just a sliver of white in his rolling eyes, and his lips curling back from those revolting teeth. When they moved on to the byre, Lili glanced over her shoulder. He was still watching. His front hooves dru
mmed a tattoo on the grass before rearing up to churn the air.
After dinner she went back. The light was fading. The sky was full of rooks flying home to roost in the three-hundred-year-old oak. She walked up to the fence. He came to meet her but would not let her pat him even when she yanked up a clump of long grass and fed it to him, soil-clogged roots and all. But it’s morning now, one of those mornings when everything is made new. The sun is warm on her bare arms, the sky is duck-egg blue, the cropped grass has a mossy sheen. Walking towards her from the far end of the enclosure, Ronnie could be a painting by Stubbs.
‘Hello, Ronnie,’ she says, ‘or are you Reggie today?’
Ronnie regards her with his intelligent gaze for several seconds before his powerful neck reaches over the fence and his long head lunges at her groin. She leaps back, startling the horse, which wheels away from her, shaking his head, turning one way, then the other, in a tight circle of agitation. His rolling eyes show their unnerving crescent of white.
‘He thinks you’ve something in your pocket for him.’
She turns. It’s the son – what’s his name, Jake? – in the sweater he had on last night, the same sweater he was wearing a fortnight ago. That same dirty face, too. What are the chances? Even now she can hardly believe it. She should have left the moment she spotted him, but the room was so astoundingly cheap, and she had been looking all day. Even after seven hours’ sleep, the thought of having to find somewhere else exhausts her. It’s awkward, of course, but she’ll bring him round. Actors talk a lot of rot about their craft. It’s mostly a matter of getting people to like you.
‘You don’t want to be frightened,’ the boy says. ‘He’s big, right enough, but he reckons you’re the threat.’
‘I’m not frightened. He just made me jump.’
‘Is that right?’
The sun brings out the suppleness of his skin under his high shaving line.
Lili gives a charming half-shrug. ‘Well, perhaps a little bit frightened.’
‘You’ll need to get over that.’
He takes hold of her wrist. The horse’s alarm has subsided, but his ears still twitch. The velvety nose sniffs her palm with a tickle of warm breath. She shivers, pulling free of the boy’s grip, but her nerves remember the light, sure circle of his fingers around her wrist.
‘What do I do now?’
‘It’s not what you do, it’s what you are. If that’s right, he’ll smell it on you—’
She raises an eyebrow.
‘It’s like any relationship, when you get down to it.’
Gingerly she places the flat of her hand on Ronnie’s muscular neck. The chestnut coat is coarse and warm, faintly gritty. She takes in the veins standing proud on his gleaming haunches, the carved muscle of his breast, and smiles. It’s the first time she has felt at peace for weeks. Stroking a horse. Such a banal act, yet it holds her completely absorbed. Or almost. A part of her remains aware of the boy’s eyes, so dark they seem all pupil. The ragged knit of his black brows.
‘How’re you doing?’ he asks.
‘All right,’ she says, echoing his level tone.
‘That’s how he’s all right. He likes you.’
The horse’s head lifts, the black lips pulling back in a gum-baring sneer.
Seeing her unease, Jake takes hold of her wrist again. ‘He’s flehmening. It’s how he knows if a mare’s in heat.’
Is this what passes for a chat-up line hereabouts?
‘Your mother said he’d been gelded.’
‘He doesn’t know that.’
‘Presumably he was there at the time.’
His laugh gusts against her cheek. ‘It’s years ago now. He’s forgotten. He’s not too keen on the vet, mind, but the instinct’s still there.’
‘I thought the whole point was to get rid of the instinct.’
He laughs again. There are men who find her hilarious whatever she says, though it’s not their sense of humour she tickles.
By now she is gaining confidence with the horse. She runs her hand down his neck, pressing into his warm flank. Without moving, Ronnie seems to return the pressure. It’s so easeful here, the sun on her skin, her thoughts lost in the rhythm of her stroking. The long head moves towards her, the nose furrowing, brushing her bare flesh. Soft lips nuzzle her elbow with the slight suction of a kiss, a rasping-tender tongue licks the salt from her skin. The brown teeth part around her arm. With a cry she jerks away, and the horse, startled – or thwarted – backs off, tossing his head.
‘I thought he was going to bite.’
‘He was.’
Even with the sun in her eyes she can see the boy’s grin.
‘You told me…’
‘I never told you to let him get a taste of you.’
‘It’s a relationship, you said.’
‘You need to show him who’s boss.’
‘And that’s your idea of relating?’
‘It’s good advice if you don’t want bitten by a horse.’
Reluctantly she laughs.
‘You’ll know next time,’ he says.
‘Oh no, he’s had his chance. There won’t be a next time.’
As if to demonstrate his indifference, Ronnie drops his head and begins cropping at the grass.
Jake hoists himself up to sit on the paddock fence. His hands, with their intricate pattern of cuts and calluses, hang between his open thighs.
‘I could teach you to ride him,’ he says, his voice so soft it’s almost a croon.
This is when it hits her: how utterly grotesque! To have met in that place, under those circumstances, and still they’re scratching the old itch.
‘How long are you staying?’
She doesn’t even try to keep the bitterness out of her voice. ‘Until nature takes its course.’
He quizzes his brows, puzzled by the change in her. It’s almost as if he hasn’t recognised her. She dismisses the thought as too preposterous. She could list the music that was playing on the radio, reproduce the swirl of the carpet, describe the clothes he was wearing. Every detail of that day is burned into her memory. She folds her hands across the flat of her stomach. His glance drops from her face, and a bolt of understanding passes through him, leaving – she sees it clearly – its scorch-trail of shame. The next moment his supple skin seems to petrify, the sootiness she took for dirt revealed as a freakish darkness in the pigment itself. His eyes, so alive till now, are suddenly opaque. He blames her, that much is clear. For turning up to remind him, for putting him to shame, maybe even for the unspeakable thing itself.
‘I usually make more of an impression,’ she says, her tone overfamiliar now, though a moment ago it sounded quite natural.
He jumps down from the fence and walks away.
Wink
The Everyday Miracle Clinic was tucked away in one of those country towns that smell of warm rolls and sweet tea first thing in the morning. We crawled the length of the main street behind a flatbed lorry stacked roof-high with haybales, Frankie cursing at the wheel while I gazed into shop windows stocked with fishing tackle and embroidery silks and patent leather court shoes. How could anything provided here be better than the equivalent service in Glasgow or Edinburgh? It was an objection the clinic seemed to have anticipated. A pair of Victorian villas connected by a brick extension, the place was a warren of ramped floors and winding corridors cluttered with so many Sanderson curtains, and skirted armchairs in toning chintzes, and Oriental vases under lampshades of slubbed silk, that I yearned for the squeak of lino and the tang of disinfectant. It was all so knowing, every detail calculated to reassure the sort of cash-rich, time-poor metropolitans who liked the idea of country air but panicked when they couldn’t get a skinny decaf latte. In short, people like us.
‘Through here are the relaxation rooms.’
The doctor reached for the door but Frankie got there first. She dipped her knees in a sort of curtsey and I noticed again how coltishly long-limbed she was, how those sky-blue scrubs bro
ught to mind a larky child in her pyjamas. To your mind, said Frankie’s voice in my head. At some point on the drive home he was going to give me a lecture about negative thinking, and he’d be right. If we were going to spend all that money, I had to give them a chance.
‘And this is where it all happens.’
I don’t know what I’d been expecting. Maybe a sci-fi laboratory, masked professionals working silent as ghosts in the brilliance of steel and glass. Certainly not this.
The cream-papered walls and vinyl floor did nothing to disguise the fact that we were standing in what had once been a master bedroom. One wall was lined with what looked to me like kitchen units: cupboards and drawers. There was a vibration-proof table with a high-powered microscope, a freezer, an incubator, a clutter of metal boxes and moulded-plastic paraphernalia. While I couldn’t identify all the equipment, the feel of the place was deeply familiar. The technicians chatting in a corner (clearly not about work), the white surfaces scuffed from years of use, the tendency of the British workplace to drift into a state of controlled chaos. Any minute now, someone was going to tell us, ‘It looks a mess but I know where everything is.’
Frankie put a brave face on it, but I could tell he too was disheartened. ‘So this is what we get for our ten grand?’
The doctor shed her girlish air. ‘And the best record in the country for working with peri-menopausal mothers.’
I caught his eye, making a that’s told you face, although we both knew I was the one who’d been put in my peri-menopausal place.
Frankie MacKewon was the first boy I ever kissed, a two-minute slather under the mirrorball at our high school Christmas party. He was drunk on vodka he’d smuggled past the teachers in a Coke bottle. I can still feel the sting of it on my mouth ulcer. Next morning I asked Lilias, who happened to be around, if people always kissed with their tongues, and she answered with enough autobiographical detail to make me sorry I’d asked. Frankie was a wet-lower-lip kisser. Not perfect but, as I was to discover at my next Christmas party, preferable to an out-and-out drooler. We had never spoken that I remember, but we’d sat through spelling and sums and story-writing together, stroked catkins, decorated Easter bonnets, glued collages of autumn leaves. He was there the day I started at St Ursula’s Primary: a stocky child with ginger hair. At high school he turned semi-tough, as teenage boys had to if they wanted to survive, growling at the back of the class with a couple of pals who supported Celtic. By the time we’d turned sixteen, the genuine toughs were gone and he could safely boast of reading Lord of the Rings twice and knowing the words to every Billy Bragg song. The possibility of talking to boys was one of the revelations of the fifth year – almost more of a revelation than that it was possible to kiss them. On Tuesday afternoons our free periods coincided and we’d sit in the common room, pulling chunks off the foam-rubber seat cushions where their covers had split, discussing abortion and capital punishment and whether Joey Donnelly had really had sex with Mrs Wintour.