by Anna Taylor
Richard (oh, tanned one) says his favourite thing about Faith’s body is her tan lines, left over from summer afternoons at the beach. Even without any clothes on, she has a little pair of white briefs etched into her skin, and two white triangles on her (not very big) breasts. They are so faint now, Faith can hardly believe they are such a stand-out for him, but it is the Playboy model look from the early 1970s, or so he says. Those girls made tan lines fashionable, coquettish, unbearably sexy. He has a collection of the vintage magazines at home which his first wife bought him, as a joke. So sexy, Richard says—and Faith never feels sure if he’s referring to his first wife, the giving of the gift, or the magazines themselves. He likes the word sexy, and defines the world, somehow, by what is and isn’t. He uses it in a way that unsettles Faith, as if it is some kind of liquid, perhaps a liqueur, breathily leaking out of his mouth.
Faith has tried saying it back to him—your hands are. so. sexy—but when she says the word in his presence she feels like some kind of badly animated cartoon character, perhaps with oversized shoes that trip her up whenever she tries to move. A lurch forward, followed by a stumble, inside.
*
Months before his death—did he know even then that the process was already underway?—Ernie began to compile a list of postmortem dos and don’ts. He would bring it up—his death, and the aftermath—in the most inappropriate of settings, often causing conversation to come to a standstill around him. He started up about it at a distant relative’s wedding, just before dessert, and at one of Phil’s birthday dinners (though perhaps that was more understandable, the link between birthdays and death at least being clear).
‘Don’t go packing me in under the earth,’ he’d say gravely (ironic, that) when everyone else was talking house prices, or, ‘Just throw me straight into the flames,’ when someone mentioned the heat. He had become smaller with age, his voice, too, quite small, and as a result everyone paid less attention to him, as if he was already shrinking away into nothing, right there in his seat.
Once he was in the hospital, though, death didn’t seem to interest him so much. Perhaps it was too close by then, a large but indistinct shape moving towards him. He would change the subject whenever the word arose, and this made everyone believe that it wasn’t coming to get him after all. Faith discovered in herself a love for him that she’d never felt for anything else before—not even babies or injured pets. She felt it as an all-enveloping heat, a sort of a roar, filling up her entire body. She wanted to fold him up like a napkin and smuggle him out of there under her jacket. She would be flying, inside, when she walked down the corridor towards his room.
Ernie always seemed to be waiting for her, his ally, or that’s how it felt. In the early days he was full of instructions the very moment she appeared by his bed: he wanted Faith to smuggle socks onto his feet, even though he wasn’t allowed them in case he slipped, or he demanded to be put back in bed straight after a nurse had got him into a chair to practise sitting. His feet seemed to grow larger by the day, round and hard, the toes sticking out of them like claws. They were as cold as stone. Getting socks onto them, especially when hurrying, was almost impossible.
After a few weeks, though, he became more resigned to routine. Words seemed to matter less. Faith understood, now, what needed to be done. He knew the sound of her footsteps coming down the corridor. As soon as she caught sight of him he’d be slipping his dentures out of his mouth, holding them out to her, wanting them to be cleaned.
*
Their accommodation is not a lodge or chalet, as Nana Jo may have liked them to think, but an overpriced backpackers’ swarming with Germans. The owners look tired—they work seven-day weeks, they tell Faith and her mother, and have done so, without a holiday, for ten years. Perhaps this explains—or is an attempt to excuse—why they charge like a four-star hotel, even though there are no stars (or hotels, for that matter) in sight. Both of them might have been attractive once, Faith thinks—Ken and Barbie wearing polar fleece—but everything about them misses the mark now. Her blonde hair is teased up and is set so firmly it doesn’t even bounce as she walks; his has been dyed dark brown but has a plum-coloured sheen in the light. They refer to each other, humourlessly, as ‘the husband’ and ‘the wife’.
‘Childless,’ Faith’s mother whispers to her as they exit through the sliding door.
She turns back to smile at them after she’s said it.
In the unit, Nana Jo is busy cleaning, having already piled the luggage out of the car and placed the bags, tidily, in the entrance to each room. She is using a sock—just an old sock of mine, she says—to dust the window sills, but there is no judgement or disapproval in her movement. She darts around the room, cheerily gathering the dust, and then flapping the sock outside on the porch to get rid of the excess. She is like a happy sparrow taking a dust bath, although, of course, the intention here is quite the opposite. She pats Faith supportively on the forearm as she passes her. ‘What point is life if you don’t make the best of it?’ she once said to Faith. Faith’s mother had tried to adopt this attitude, but it didn’t sit so comfortably on her. There was a resentful quality to her brightness, a slight aggressiveness. It was impossible to match yourself against a happy disposition such as Nana Jo’s.
___
Ernie’s ashes are placed in the corner of the room. No one wants to have to look at them all the time, says Nana Jo. Trudie and John don’t seem to want to look at them at all, subtly turning away—but towards each other—whenever they are near them. They met on a cruise ship, where they were both working for six months to pay off their student loans. John proposed to her within weeks, using the ring off a Coca-Cola can. This detail is intended to demonstrate the depth of their passion for each other, but in some company the anecdote falls flat.
‘Well then,’ Nana Jo had said to Trudie when she first heard. ‘Are you engaged to a man or a can?’
No one except Faith had laughed.
John is in his mid-twenties, but looks sixteen, with his hair spiked up with gel and his whole being radiating the odour of spray-on supermarket cologne. He plays football, and is knotted with sinewy muscle on his top half, but his fair-haired legs have an odd shapelessness to them, a pre-pubescent look, as if he is not yet a man. He wears shorts—or cargo print three-quarters—and trainers all year round. When he laughs his shoulders jolt up and down, seemingly of their own accord. It is this, more than anything else, that irritates Faith about him. This, and the fact that when Trudie is in the room he seems incapable of making conversation with anyone—even looking at anyone—but her. Who on earth invited him along? He hardly knew Ernie, anyway.
There is a risk, Faith sometimes thinks to herself, that one day she may be eaten up by her own unpleasant thoughts. ‘You’re not just a nice girl, are you,’ Richard often says to her, although he seems to say it to fulfil his own purposes, since those words come out of his mouth only when she is in a compromised position—pressed up against the refrigerator in the office kitchen with her underpants awkwardly round her knees, or folded over the photocopier like origami, Richard holding a fistful of her hair. He’s beating to the sound of his own drum when he says things like that, she’s sure of it. It certainly seems to get things over and done with soon enough, which, quite frankly (given the time constraints of such office exchanges), is often, quite simply, a relief.
*
In the last week of his life, Ernie decided that Nana Jo was having an affair with one of his nurses. He announced this to Faith quite matter-of-factly one afternoon, his eyebrows raised earnestly.
‘She’s hanging around with him, you know,’ he said, opening his mouth immediately afterwards to accommodate a spoon with a mound of wobbling red jelly on it that Faith was attempting to steer towards him. He was off his food generally and the doctors were worried. He seemed no longer interested in nutrition at all, preferring the ice cream and custard, once trying to pop a little bit of it on the end of a forkful of Shepherd’s pie. He had
taken to hiding bits of food—the crusts on his morning toast, a floret of broccoli—between his blankets or in the drawers beside his bed.
Faith had waited for him to swallow and then, scooping up another spoonful, had asked him what he meant.
‘That nurse,’ he said, gesturing towards the door. ‘And your grandmother. The two of them are having it off.’ He paused, patiently, waiting for Faith to cotton on to what he was saying—that the broad, hairy-armed Scottish nurse with one gold stud in his ear was indeed involved in some kind of sexual tryst with Nana Jo.
‘That’s ridiculous, Ernie,’ said Faith.
‘You’re telling me!’ He opened his mouth for the spoon again, and then swallowed. ‘He’s got it in for me now too, of course.’ He breathed out, wearily—but with no emotion—and then hooked his teeth out, studied them for a moment and laid them, carefully, in the congealed mound on his plate which was presumably supposed to resemble beef stew.
That was the beginning of the end, of course. Each day there would be a new conspiracy, which he would relay to Faith with the same resigned manner. They were turning the heating up in his room, he said, to try to suffocate him, and were giving him more pills than usual, some of which were bitter, tasted like poison.
‘I tried to call the papers,’ he said, ‘on the ward phone, but they stopped me. Of course.’
Faith would flurry around him, puffing his pillows, trying to talk some sense into him, but after a while it seemed pointless.
‘Your mother and grandmother are part of all this,’ he would say. ‘You’ll see. They’re trying to knock me off my perch.’
It was truly exhausting. But his trust in Faith—and his mad, paranoid distrust of everyone else—only made her love him more.
‘You’re my wing man,’ he would say to her, and Faith would nod, too kind to point out to him that she wasn’t a man at all. He seemed unable to differentiate by that point, once exclaiming loudly, ‘He’s a big fella!’ when a large Samoan woman with a flower in her hair came in to clean his room.
All of a sudden, though, he began to fade away from her—from all of them. One day he was giving her the soldier’s salute and the next he couldn’t be woken, and Faith, her mother and Nana Jo took shifts moistening his open mouth with a special little sponge on a stick.
The top of his head was burning hot—the Tibetans said that was what happened when someone was dying: that their soul was preparing to escape. Nana Jo told them this, her eyes wide with the wonder of folklore being borne out in this way. She seemed generally astonished by everything, but she also looked drawn and grey. Faith noticed that she was holding her own hands a lot, one palm cradling the knuckles of the other, her fingers supportively stroking the skin.
*
Nana Jo and Faith drive back into town to get supplies for dinner. The white cloud that had settled over the mountains lifts, and they see them in all their expansiveness, gleaming and sharp against the mottled plane of the sky. Their accommodation is perched at the base of the largest peak, but it is from a distance that the mountains look their best. The cloud is rolling back all along the horizon, like footage of a wave in reverse. Nana Jo hums as if she’s singing along to a tune, but there’s no music playing in the car.
‘He’d be glad we came here,’ she says.
She seems tired to Faith, although she would never admit it.
The morning before he died, Ernie woke up with a start, as if he’d slept through an alarm and suddenly realised he was late for something. He had been unconscious for twenty-four hours. He blinked rapidly, but his eyes still looked a milky blue.
‘For goodness sake!’ he said to himself when finally he seemed to take in the three faces peering over him. ‘I’m still here.’
He couldn’t get enough air—he announced this to them immediately afterwards.
‘The oxygen isn’t getting in like it should,’ he said, and his face turned grave, a trickle of panic passing over him, tightening the skin above his lip into a small grimace.
Faith’s mother went for the doctor.
‘Take me up the mountain,’ he said, ‘as if you’re going skiing.’
Nana Jo started telling him sternly that they weren’t taking him anywhere, that he had to stay right there in his bed, before realising, mid-sentence, what he meant, and stammering to a halt.
‘I want to go up like a stack of hay,’ he said, ‘and then be thrown up into the mountain air. Don’t go washing me down a river like something going down the sink. I don’t want to go under, I want to go up. In the wind. I can’t seem to get enough air right now,’ he said. ‘Is someone going to help me?’
And he carried on like that for hours. Seeming to enjoy it, the process of confusing them all.
*
In the late afternoon, having returned from town with food and drinks, Faith leaves the family to their napping, and walks through the empty camping ground to a phone booth. It is cold, and the wind is getting up. The cloud is bearing down again on all of them.
She dials the office number and then Richard’s extension, and feels oddly queasy just listening to the ringing tone. Richard doesn’t answer. His secretary, Madeleine, does. This never happens. Faith, too surprised to realise she could actually just hang up, chokes a little, and then manages to speak.
‘Faith?’ says Madeleine, her voice unnaturally perky—as usual. ‘I thought you were on leave?’
She is too dim ever to suspect anything. Faith can hear the sound of her fingers tapping away on the keyboard as she speaks.
‘I am,’ she says. ‘I am. I just remembered something I needed to tell Richard—’ she pauses— ‘about the Macmillan file.’
‘Well,’ says Madeleine, taking a gulp of something, then swallowing. ‘You’re out of luck. Serves you right for even thinking about work while you’re on holiday.’
‘He doesn’t normally leave this early.’ Faith can feel the strain in her voice, like the whine of a badly tuned instrument.
‘Yeah well—’ other phones are ringing in the background— ‘he’s gone with Annie to the doctor’s.’ Madeleine lowers her voice a little. ‘Word on the street is that they’re pregnant.’
For a moment Faith feels truly bewildered, imagining them joined together like Siamese twins, a lump, like a beach ball, growing out their conjoined stomach. Everything in her mind goes into technicolor—an image of Richard, naked, with one enormous testicle, a little foetus showing faintly through its skin. The words rattle around in her head, trying to locate sense, before they finally find their correct order and drop into place. Faith feels them fall.
Yes, that’s what the words mean: that Annie has Richard’s baby growing inside her; that it is his love—his loving of her—that is making that baby grow.
On the other side of the camping ground a Coke can is being bounced along the asphalt by the wind. The streets lights begin to flicker yellow—seeming for a moment like candle flames wavering in a breeze—and then all turn on at once.
*
They all get up at 6 a.m.—Nana Jo’s idea—and by seven they have driven up to the ski base, and have caught the chairlifts further up the mountain. Overnight the wind has got up even more and it blows at them in alarming gusts, but the sky is blue, and this is all that matters to Nana Jo.
‘A little bit of wind never hurt anybody,’ she says. And she truly seems to believe that this is the case.
They are wearing snow boots and heavy jackets, and Faith’s mother is lagging behind a bit, having removed her back-support brace for the first time in days. It was cutting into her skin when she wore it under her clothes, she said, so has recently taken to wearing it on top of them—having adjusted the straps, so that it will fit over her bulky sweatshirts—but this too is causing chaffing. Her back will just have to go unsupported.
Faith carries Ernie, holding him against her stomach, like a child carrying a ball. She thinks of Annie, with her stomach growing into a perfect round white moon. She tries to dismiss the thought, but
it keeps trotting back to her, eager, like a dog.
Trudie is lagging behind with Faith’s mother, and Nana Jo and Phil are way out front, searching, of course, for the ideal ash-scattering location. John is right behind Faith, she knows that, but she doesn’t acknowledge his presence. She tries to keep her pace even, so that he won’t think she’s slowing down to let him catch her up. He is wearing shorts, even though they’re up in the snow. This, she thinks, is reason enough to ignore him.
His voice comes towards her on a gust, surprisingly loud over her heavy breathing and the hat pulled down hard over her ears.
‘Your arse is hot.’
For a moment she takes his words literally—imagines steam drifting out through her pants, heating him in her wake. Surely he couldn’t mean anything other than that. She turns around, the urn suddenly heavy in her arms, her face registering shock. John slows down a little, but he keeps walking towards her. His cheeks have a boyish glow to them. He doesn’t look guilty in the slightest. Perhaps she misheard. She turns around again, not saying anything, but speeds up, although the striding makes her walk feel all lopsided.
She can hear the crunch-crunch of his footsteps, jogging up behind her.
‘And your tits.’ He’s puffing, so his voice sounds inappropriately loud, too enthusiastic to pull it all off. ‘Your tits are cute too.’