by Anna Taylor
So there it is. The six of them. It is true—there wouldn’t have been much room for Ernie anyway.
Outside, beyond the fences and sporadically grassed bank, the salt lakes come into view. They are a tired-looking pink, square after square of them, crystals forming on their edges. They are divided by slabs of concrete, and there is a soft mist—a soft mist that almost looks like but couldn’t possibly be steam—hovering above the ones in the middle. The mist is not surprising; it is only just past dawn.
It is the beginning of July and they are on their way to the snow. Faith has taken a week’s leave from her job on the outskirts of the city, where she works for a small PR firm, and where, four months ago, she unwisely began sleeping with her (twice married) boss. He has let her take a holiday even though this is their busiest time of year. It is a simple sort of equation. She lets him slide his tanned, dark-haired hand up her skirt between business hours, and he, in turn, lets her take her leave when she wants it. A cosy wee arrangement—when you balance things up.
The car glides effortlessly over a rise in the road, where it curves a little, and they find themselves even closer, almost level with the salty ponds.
‘Look,’ says Faith’s mother without any sign of excitement, her finger stabbing softly at the glass of the passenger window. ‘Look.’
She is pointing at the salt lakes, which Faith and Nana Jo—hopefully, considering it is she who is in charge of the wheel—have already seen. Phil lifts his head away from his magazine, but drops it instantly again, not bothering even to attempt to look interested in what’s outside.
‘Look,’ says Faith’s mother again, but as she says it the car turns a corner and the salt lakes are lost from view.
*
Ernie always said he’d like to die in late spring, along with the daffodils, but he died mid-winter, which proves you don’t always get what you want. In any other family he would have been called Granddad but his own Grandfather’s name was Ernie and for some reason he decided that’s what Faith and Phil should call him. It is ironic now, of course, Ernie being in an urn. Perhaps that had been his intention all along.
Nobody had really expected him to die when he did, though it seems now they had refused to read the signs. He had been in hospital for seven weeks, driving them all mad, showing no sign of going anywhere.
‘I’ll just wait here,’ he would say to Faith as she was leaving after every visit. ‘I’ll just be staying here then.’
It made her laugh at the time, the absurdity of it, a man so suddenly shrunken, tubed up, feet as big as baseballs, behaving as if he actually had a say in the matter.
‘Well, I’ll just stay put,’ he would say, without even a touch of sarcasm, his hand raised in a salute.
Of course, all he wanted was to be taken home.
*
Things with Faith and her boss have plateaued. If Faith were being honest with herself, she would even go as far as to say that things aren’t going well, but she wonders if they ever do—go well, that is—when it comes to adultery. She has started to feel resentful. Is that really surprising? Richard—or Retch-ard, as Faith calls him, just to herself, on the bad days—has developed a way of looking at her as if he is tired and it is she who is making him so. His eyes have a slightly red-rimmed look to them, which she never noticed in the early days but has probably always been there. The redness matches the red of his gums, which he bares when he smiles, though he doesn’t necessarily mean to. It is just that his teeth are somewhat stubby. Somewhat stubby, but alarmingly white. He isn’t tall, or particularly handsome, and this makes Faith sometimes wonder what on earth she is doing with him. Three days ago, as he was grating his cheek against the skin of her neck, she noticed his hair thinning on the top of his head. The fact that she noticed it, and also that the top of his head was something she could see, seemed like bad signs to her. Perhaps she is only with him because he refers to her as a firecracker, which is something she has always thought she would like to be but isn’t really at all.
Faith rests her head against the window. The road is surrounded by paddocks now, hilly ones that have a smattering of sheep strewn across them. Far off, pressed flat it seems against the clear skies, are the mountains, white and jagged, looking like a stage set, or at least an illusion of some kind. She feels too hot in the car. The heater is probably on full. She pulls at the neck of her jersey. She feels as if she might faint.
‘Does anyone want to stop at some tearooms?’ says Nana Jo, her voice characteristically jolly. She has two saunas a week and is clearly in her element temperature-wise.
‘Are there tearooms close by?’ says Faith’s mother.
‘Well, I don’t know, to be honest,’ says Nana Jo. ‘But I thought it was worth just throwing the idea out there, as a possibility.’
Faith looks at her watch. It isn’t even 8 a.m.
‘Does anyone feel like some valium?’ Phil says into the pages of his surf magazine. ‘Cocaine, perhaps? Anyone? No?’
He says it quietly, but loud enough so that Faith can hear. His hair is still in a state of shock, probably from prising himself from bed so early. One side of it is as flat as a pancake, but at the back and top it sticks out jauntily, almost with flair. He looks like a parrot.
‘Anyone?’ he says again, his top lip leering a little at his own joke. His face is completely smooth, Faith notices, even though he turns twenty-four next month. His girlfriend has recently left him for his best friend, or some such thing. It has given his manner an edge that was never there before.
‘Ah, well. All the more for me then,’ he says. And all of a sudden—like a crashing sound far off, a sudden disintegration—Faith finds herself bewildered, and can’t tell if he’s joking, or not.
*
As children, Faith and Phil had dreamed of a skiing holiday. It was something that seemed exotic to them, just out of reach, a snowy-topped, quivering mirage. That was the ticket to success, somehow—just going for one skiing trip with your family.
Ernie may have known that, but he also may not have. Faith was never sure what he remembered and what he simply improvised. He had the serene authority and mannered charm of someone accustomed to the stage, a sense of occasion and drama in an otherwise ordinary world. When they were small he had pulled coin after coin from deep within his ear canal. It had appalled Faith at the time, this abundance of metal in people’s heads. She had imagined when she moved hers too that there was a jingling deep inside—all that metal, and Ernie the only one in her life able to extract it.
Of course, he was also the only one who, until recently, had not successfully extracted himself. There had been Faith’s father who, as her mother always said, had taken off and left the three of them when Phil was only three—the matching numbers somehow detracting from the awfulness of it, moving it into a realm that was more bearable, approaching humour. Ted, of course, had had all the good intentions required, having nursed his dying wife through MS while bringing up their only daughter all alone—or so the story went—but his good intentions seemed unable to be contained within the nest. He was overflowing with good intentions wherever they were required. All that trauma, Faith’s mother used to say good-naturedly. She said it with such emphasis that, after a while, it began to seem like a sound an animal might make: a low, drawn-out ache.
It wasn’t until after Ted officially left, or after he was officially—finally—kicked out, that Faith’s mother began to balloon. It was a slow, steady sort of process, as if someone, puff by puff, were blowing her up with air. She developed rolls on her neck that grew shiny with sweat on warm days. The skin round her ankles seemed to be falling over itself to get to the floor.
Faith and Phil watched the whole process with an adolescent helplessness that grew into adult helplessness over time. Ernie and Nana Jo, advocates of fruit, vegetables and yoga in the morning, must have felt a certain helplessness too.
‘Your mother’s body is just all brimming over with sadness,’ Nana Jo said to Faith o
ne day, a conspiratorial hush in her voice.
Faith had never felt sure if it was the brimming over, or the sadness, that was cause for such a tone. Both things seemed to be wallowing around in a shameful realm, equally fascinating and awful, like the holocaust, or a nuclear bomb.
‘Be grateful for your suffering,’ Faith once read on the back cover of a self-help book. ‘It is the greatest gift you will ever receive.’ It was true, of course. She bought it for her mother and gave her the gift of the book—advocating the gift of suffering—for her birthday. ‘Gifts come in many guises!’ she wrote in the card. She was trying to be light-hearted.
*
In a town with nothing in it but a store, a butcher and a cluster of tired-looking houses, Nana Jo pulls up beside a concrete block of public toilets. Nothing, it seems, is open except for the toilets, and outside of them stand a man and woman (boy and girl, really) with clipboards. One by one they all—Faith and Phil, Trudie and John, Nana Jo and Faith’s mother—launch their deadened bodies out of the car and walk jaggedly across the car park like a flock of strange, misshapen birds, bent forward a little, lifting their legs and putting them down again in halting, jerky movements.
The air is cold—wet-feeling—even though the sky is perfectly blue.
Inside the toilets the cubicle doors don’t lock, and there is no soap to speak of, though there are two dispensers and a coating of slime on the soap dish on the basin which certainly suggests some did exist, once. Nana Jo has brought her hairbrush in with her, but there’s no mirror either. She doesn’t seem put off, and instead doubles her body forward and begins to whack her head with the brush, with vigorous movements reminiscent of some sort of medieval torture. Her short, wiry crop of hair, under the wild attentions of the brush, appears to be trying to get as far away from her scalp as possible.
‘Better than washing it,’ Nana Jo says by means of explanation when she’s finished.
When they emerge back into the morning light, the clipboarded pair slide towards them. They are doing a survey for the local council, they say, compiling satisfaction ratings of the amenities. Would they be willing to take part? Their faces seem wide and eager with hope—hers caked with a ghostly foundation that has been applied only halfway down her neck, his blooming with rosy clusters of acne. They both have deep-set eyes. Perhaps they are related.
‘Will it take long?’ says Nana Jo. ‘We’re on our way to somewhere.’ She says it with such authority and self-importance that it seems she is entirely unaware of the obviousness of the statement: that a town like this would almost never be the actual destination. She smiles brightly at them after she’s said it, encouragingly even.
They queue up, all six of them, and one by one answer the questions. When Faith’s turn comes, though, she forgets to list anything of actual importance in the ‘Suggestions for Improvement’ section, and just mentions the lack of mirror, somehow forgetting, for that moment, the lack of soap and missing lock.
As they crawl back into the car, she asks Phil for his rating out of ten. She mimes holding a microphone out to him when she does it, which is the sort of thing that would have delighted him when he was small.
‘One,’ he says, with no sign of humour.
‘One! So low!’ says Faith, adjusting the paraphernalia around her—discarded clothes, pillows, an array of shoes—and buckling her belt.
Phil has already found his magazine, and has opened it on a poster page of an enormous claw-like wave, a dot of a man crouched beneath the froth of white.
‘There was no toilet paper,’ says Phil. And still no smile.
‘Marlene always came first,’ says Faith’s mother to Nana Jo, ‘but Helen was the beauty.’
The two of them have been foraging through the past—old neighbourhoods, street names—and are now onto the Martyns, who were raising their two granddaughters: their neighbours from around forty years ago. Faith has gathered this from tuning in occasionally through the cloud of her own dream-like thoughts. Everyone else in the car is in a doze too.
‘With a name like that,’ says Faith’s mother, ‘and she did look like a goddess.’
‘Dead eyes, though. Not much happening between those pretty ears of hers,’ Nana Jo says.
The radio, gurgling away in the background, suddenly turns to static, and instead of turning it down one of them turns the dial in the wrong direction, so that the static turns to a violent screech, just for a moment, before it is hurriedly switched off.
‘Thick as a brick,’ agrees Faith’s mother, her voice now sounding clear and strong, only the hum of the car in the background. Nana Jo and Faith’s mother make identical clacking sounds of agreement with their tongues.
‘And Mr Martyn, always saying, “Will you look at that,” no matter what you said to him. Remember that? You’d tell him you were on the way to town and he’d say, “Will you look at that.”’ When she says this, Nan Jo lowers her voice and gives it a sort of a lilt, sounding not like herself at all but presumably like Mr Martyn. ‘It was as if that was his way of encouraging you, in a conversation. Funny man,’ she says. ‘Terribly kind.’
‘Marlene used to say, “My Dad’s a bad egg.” All the time.’
‘Not about Mr. Martyn?’ Nana Jo lowers her voice even more at this, though it’s clear she’s just playing around.
‘The father,’ says Faith’s mother, ‘whoever he was. She’d always say it: “My Dad’s a bad egg.” Must’ve been something she overheard. Mind you, they’d know about eggs, considering all those hens.’
At this the two of them chuckle—a love of bad jokes, clearly, runs in the family—and Faith can hear her mother shifting around in her seat, re-adjusting her back-support straps.
‘Marlene told me that Helen got pregnant from playing on the jungle gym too much.’
‘I’ll bet,’ says Nana Jo.
‘I believed her for a while. I was only—how old would I have been? Twelve?’
‘Bless,’ says Nana Jo, and the two of them fall into a sudden silence.
The silence draws Faith out of her dozing, and her eyes waver open for a moment. Outside, grassy plains stretch out on either side of the road, wide and flat, but flickering in the breeze. The grasses are a milky copper—sun bleached and parched-looking, but still bristling, undeniably alive. The car is in the base of a valley, and it feels to Faith as if they have sunk to the bottom of a bowl, hurtling along towards a certain end, surrounded by mountainous walls.
‘Will you look at that,’ says Nana Jo, but she says it in her own voice, not Mr Martyn’s, and therefore must be referring to the mountains. It seems she has already forgotten about the Martyns and their granddaughters. The conversation has returned to the road.
*
Richard likes to send Faith emails at work that say things like, ‘I’d like to tha(fuck)nk you for getting the Ellroy job finished in time.’ That sort of thing. He sits behind a glass wall in their office, and after he’s sent an email he watches her, waiting for the moment when she opens it. She is training herself not to react, but she must give it away somehow, because he waits for the moment so blatantly before going back to his work. He has hands which are square, roped with veins, and brown from the weekends that he spends in the garden with his wife. She, by contrast, is pearly white, oddly luminous, like frosted glass. Her name is Annie—which is, Faith thinks, the perfect name for the wife of a man one has an affair with—but he refers to her simply as A. She always wears rubber-soled ballet flats that are imported from somewhere in Spain. Not cheap, that’s for sure, and always muted, tasteful blues and apricots—though once Faith saw her in a pair that were a washed-out gold. It is not that she is even particularly pretty—she has features that are small and pale also, and a slight stoop, exaggerated on the left side—but she has an effortless manner that exhausts Faith. That, and the fact that Richard has told Faith the two of them have sex in the garden (most probably amongst their well-kept hydrangea bushes) on Sundays, after they’ve done the mulching. He is a b
eliever in honesty, he says, though clearly only with Faith. Jealousy is an unnecessary emotion, Richard says, which is obviously why he doesn’t tell his wife about her—so that she won’t be troubled with pointless thoughts.
A. is the love of his life, he says—aloof, adorable. But Faith—well, Faith is a firecracker.
Such perfect alliteration.
*
The car passes a road sign with large white lettering. They are 72 km from their destination, or so it says—their destination being the mountain, and a lodge (Nana Jo refers to it as a chalet) that they booked last week.
Inside the car it is now eerily quiet. They are filled to the brim with extraneous materials which, when they set off, appeared to be important items. Now it seems they are all at sea, utterly swamped by things that resemble rubbish more closely than they resemble anything else. Faith has misplaced one of her shoes, both of her socks and her sunglasses case. Every now and then she tries to locate them: a process that makes her look—or, rather, feel—like a long-beaked bird searching in the undergrowth for grubs. Everyone in the car reminds Faith of an animal today. She wonders if she’s developing a disorder. Last week, in fact, she sat on the bus opposite a family of Swedish tourists who, alarmingly, turned into a family of guinea pigs right in front of her eyes. The little one was the first to set it off—she had such perfectly protruding teeth, and white down that matched her hair, curling its way down the edges of her hamster cheeks. Once Faith started looking—whilst, of course, trying to maintain the illusion of not looking—she realised they were all toothy, though not in an unattractive way. Cute, really. And eating nuts out of a paper bag, which only made matters worse. Guinea pigs. Or happy squirrels. Marvellously tanned.