It's Gone Dark Over Bill's Mother's

by Lisa Blower

  What she can do is be wakeful with me. ‘I need to be wakeful with someone I trust not sleepless alone,’ I’d explained when I called her up to ask if I might stay overnight. And though she mentioned the twins—‘You know they don’t sleep, Laura’—mentioned Rowan and her friends—‘She comes in when she wants now. I just count the shoes to know who’s here’—reminded me of Paul—‘He works late. He’s elephant footed’—I explained that it was the kind of noises I needed. ‘And you have a spare room,’ I’d said. ‘You won’t even know I am there.’ But she went quiet at this. She was quiet for a very long time. ‘It’s not spare,’ she snapped eventually. ‘But there’s the armchair in the kitchen if you like.’

  Mia comes from under the kitchen table and looks at the box of pills in her hand. She squints at the label, though her glasses are parked on her head, and tells me she’d rather I take one on a full stomach. Then she checks the time and checks her phone and just listens, and I realise that this is the first time she has thought about the baby since I got here. I want to say, ‘He was never here, Mia. He never made it home.’ But the moment isn’t long enough and the spare room remains spare, and then the home phone starts up and she rushes off to answer it because it’s half past six which means it’s Paul.

  She does what she always does: clips her voice, shuts down, reels off stock answers that are the same every week: Rowan is out. The twins are fine. There’ll be cold pasta in the fridge. Yes, she’s tired but Laura’s here. It’s Tuesday, isn’t it? He offers to call later, I assume, because she says, ‘Not to worry. I’m exhausted anyway. Though Laura wants to do that sleepless thing,’ and I still don’t know what it is that Paul does, just that he works with computers and that he’s often in the States now on trips that can last all week.

  I trade the Hoover bag for pasta and eat it in the armchair. Not because I can’t get up to the table but because I suddenly feel so terribly defiant. I find myself saying, ‘You’ve not asked me a single thing yet about what I’m to do tonight when I’m relying on you, Mia. I can’t do this on my own.’ And she sighs at me and puts down her fork.

  ‘You know, my mother got attacked by a bunch of kids last Saturday night,’ she says. ‘They’d followed her home from the pub. Gold, they said. Old women always have gold. Even took the earrings from her ears. When the police call me, she’s already in hospital. Stuffed in a bed in renal with a fractured ankle and bruised wrists where they’d grabbed her and dragged her about. Christ knows what they thought she had. But they took it all. And do you know what she says to me? “We’ve all been there, Mia. They’re just kids who can’t handle their drink.”’ She stops to drink wine then instructs Margot to eat—‘No, you’re not full, Margot. I can still see room in your belly’—and as Margot giggles at her mum’s tickling socked foot, Mia tosses the pills in my lap.

  ‘Right then, ice cream!’ and I watch Mia chisel out ice cream as bright as cheese from a tub with a bread knife. Henry asks for sprinkles and strawberry sauce—she has neither—and Margot wants a flake and a surprise. Mia snaps a flake in half—there’s only one—and roots through the cupboards again. She presents them with two bowls of too-cold ice cream with a dusting of hot chocolate, half a broken flake, a squeeze of honey, and they look at their cocktail glasses wide-eyed. There’s even little cocktail umbrellas that she’s found, like she finds their missing socks, time for cuddles and bedtime stories that go beyond the page, and she says, ‘Go on then. But only half the film before bath. You have school.’ And they skip into the other room to watch the telly. Then she turns to me sadly: ‘I’m crap at this, Laura. I’m crap at it all.’

  But her pager goes and she’s looking down on it and the sadness is replaced with rage. She tells me that they can’t move the body until morning because there’s no spare porter on shift until 6 a.m. and the family are going berserk. ‘I leave them for five fucking minutes,’ she says, and reaches for her mobile and scrolls through the numbers, makes a call. She’s snappy. ‘Phone fucking Ken then! You cannot leave him there overnight.’ Then she’s running her hand through her hair, finds her glasses, puts them on, drinks more wine. ‘I’ll phone Ken then,’ and she’s scrolling through the numbers again, finding Ken, and this time she’s sympathetic. ‘I know, I know,’ she says. Pause. Hmmm. ‘But do it for me, please?’ And he does. I don’t know how she does it, but Ken is driving back to work to wheel a man who is ninety-six to the mortuary and give him the respect he deserves.

  You’re amazing, I think. How do you not sleep?

  She puts down the phone and downs the wine. She’s tired and she looks it yet she smiles at me. At my half-eaten bowl of pasta. ‘You’ll get ice cream if you finish that,’ she says, and I find I am smiling back. I pick up the box of pills from my lap and say, ‘It’s the other ones I want you to look at. They’re ever such a funny shape and I’m not sleeping. Not sleeping at all. I mean, I know I’m not meant to be sleeping tonight, and I know I don’t not sleep. But I don’t want to be taking one of my panic pills if that’s going to make me sleep when that’s not what they want me to do. But when I close my eyes to sleep I fear I will never know life again.’

  She runs her hand though her hair and pulls the ponytail loose. ‘Laura,’ she begins, and rubs at her face hard as if stopping herself from saying something other than, ‘Did he give you any information that I should read before we do this?’

  ‘Of course,’ I say. ‘There’s a whole booklet we need to go through. I’ve read it myself, gone through it a couple of times and made notes. But it’s the afterwards that’s bothering me and what pills I should take in the morning because I’m going to be very tired but still awake. So I’ve bought enough clothes for forty-eight hours just in case, though I can always pop home and get more if you think I’d be better staying here, because it’s not the during but the afterwards that he says could be worse … ’ But the home phone is going again. She throws up her hands—I don’t believe this—as neither do I, and she leaves the room just as the answer-machine clicks in. It’s Rowan. She wants picking up at nine and might have a friend with her. Mia grabs the phone.

  ‘Rowan. No, I’m here. I didn’t know you were working, why didn’t you say? … Because it’s Tuesday, isn’t it? Laura’s here … What? No. I can’t do that, Rowan. You’ll have to get a taxi.’ She sighs loudly. ‘Yes, yes, I’ll pay him when you get here. Bye.’ And then she shrieks at the twins: ‘Bath! Now!’ Because she’s just realised that it’s half past seven and she comes back into the kitchen to tell me this. ‘Help yourself to whatever,’ she says, though I’ve barely touched my pasta. ‘Ice cream, wine. Now get up those stairs before I drag you up them!’ And as she heads off to chase the twins up the stairs, I am left thinking of her own mother whom I’ve never met, not even seen a photograph of, being dragged around by a bunch of kids for her gold. It makes me look at my wrists and I check them over. I think of the pills in my hand, in my bag, those of my mother’s which I swallowed one by one by one and how they didn’t work, it didn’t work, and I go to my bag and the panic surges from the back of my throat.

  ‘Now, you can call,’ this new doctor had said. ‘If anything starts to feel wrong you must call.’ And I think about using her phone. I could use her phone, couldn’t I? Help yourself to whatever, she’d said. She wouldn’t mind. So I do.

  I don’t know what makes me do it. I’ve watched her scroll through her numbers so many times now I know her address book off by heart. I’m surprised when he answers. ‘Hello,’ he says, and ‘What’s up?’ He sounds like he’s working, he’s distracted anyway, and I hear him tap, tap at a computer. ‘Mia?’ he says. And he sounds decent. He works too much and he stays away from her and they talk on the phone as if cold calling about double glazing, but I also remember Mia once said to me, ‘Either I’ll have an affair, he will or we will part if I don’t start dealing with it.’ But they haven’t parted, not yet, and he does sound decent. Like he cares. So I tell him: ‘I’m a very good friend of your wife who is upstairs ba
thing your children at almost eight when they should be in bed. Your other daughter is coming home from work in a taxi that she cannot afford and there’s a plane ticket in the kitchen drawer. She’s accepted a job in New Zealand and it’s time you took down that cot from the spare room. There is also someone who calls who makes her smile. I think these are things you ought to know.’ I put down the phone.

  It’s not that I don’t sleep. I know I don’t not sleep. I could fall asleep right now if I wanted to, but that’s not what they want me to do. And Mia was fine about it when I asked her, if not a little distracted, but then she’s always distracted by something. Her mobile rings all the time, then it’s the home phone or her pager. Everyone wants a piece of her. Even when she’s incomplete. My mother used to tear pieces off me. For wanting to work here. For taking a job there. For taking up driving lessons. For not coming home when I said. ‘It makes me panic, Laura,’ she would say as I’d stick my fingers down her throat. ‘I don’t like not knowing where you are. When you’re with me, I can get out of the woods.’ But she allowed those trees to keep on growing.

  Mia is gone for a long time upstairs. There isn’t much chatter. No arguments or messing, as she calls it. The twins are tired. They will sleep easy but waken, as they do, and crawl into her bed so that Paul will get up and sleep in the armchair beside the range that they still don’t know how to use. Except Mia will stay awake. Sniffing their foreheads, stroking their cheeks, kissing them all over, just in case, just in case.

  ‘You can’t keep watching them, Mia,’ I once heard Paul saying over the monitor one evening as I put on my coat to head home. ‘They are not Ben. Ben was never going to last the night. We always knew that.’ And Mia had wept. She’d nursed all her life, she’d said. If anyone could’ve saved him, it should have been her. ‘I just want to sleep, Paul,’ she had cried. ‘I want to go to sleep and not ever wake up.’

  Mia comes back into the kitchen looking weary. She is surprised to see me, as if she’s forgotten I was there at all. ‘I’m so sorry,’ she begins, and she checks the time and fills her glass and asks if she can look at the booklet. ‘But you have your coat on,’ she points out.

  ‘I do,’ I say.

  ‘You don’t have to go,’ she says. ‘I’m more than happy to do this with you. I’ll take a shower in a minute. That’ll perk me up. Just let me take a look at these new pills so I know what I’m dealing with.’ And she holds out her hands. But I don’t give her the box. I give her my hands.

  ‘Get some sleep, Mrs Onions,’ I instruct and let myself out into the night.

  As I walk down the street, a car comes hurtling around the corner as if a life depended upon it. I know it’s Paul though I have met him only briefly, but it’s him and it makes me glow with the sort of happiness I thought I would never know again. And then a taxi appears, struggling around the bend. Rowan will get out, run in for her mother’s money, and then, perhaps, they will talk, the three of them, about Oxford, about New Zealand, about what happens next. Perhaps they will all get some sleep.

  I throw all the pills I have stashed in my overnight bag into the next litter bin I see. It’s not a big feeling that I have but it’s a positive one and I have no idea for how long it will last. That new doctor had said, ‘Be wakeful with someone you trust not sleepless alone,’ though he did warn it’d be short-lived. ‘Short-lived positivity,’ he’d said. ‘That could be lost once you sleep again but at least you will have felt something else.’ Though I’d call it short lives. Mia knows that better than anyone. As I know that I need to start trusting myself that I can sleep alone. And I don’t not sleep that night. But I do feel like I know where some of the pieces are now. And that’s a jigsaw only I can complete.

  Fron

  IT WAS NEVER meant to be a vast life anyway. Small, he’d said. We’ll live like dormice, fuck like rabbits. He was drafting his resignation letter at the time.

  But when she arrived, and in the dark, her breath took up all the room. A cold place, grey stone, thick slate, and damp. It was the first thing she could smell. Then, that stench that comes with opening a fridge door that hasn’t been used in months.

  She hit the lights.

  Jesus, Michael.

  He was sitting at the table with a glass of wine and a bouquet of nettles wrapped in silver foil.

  You took your time.

  He pushed the stinging bouquet towards her.

  For you.

  She doesn’t look at them. She knows what he wants her to say.

  How long have you been here? I thought we said eight.

  She is sharp with him. He is sharper with her.

  Where have you been?

  What do you mean where have I been?

  She throws her car keys onto the table in front of him.

  Leaving, Michael. It takes time to leave.

  He looks at her jealously. Starts with the questions. How was it? How did he take it? Did you get lost on the way up? I told you—left turn at the crossroads, left again. You can miss it completely in the fog. Did you miss it?

  Yes, she’d missed it. She’d had to go back down to come up again by which time the fog had settled in dense chunks. As she’d started back down, she had kept going. Missed the turning a second time. There were less people in the world up here than there were down there. Not enough people and you missed your way. She’d not seen a signpost in hours. It’d dropped dark and got darker.

  I don’t know if I can do this, Michael.

  He pushes the bouquet of nettles closer. She ignores them. She is in no mood. Thinks of her mother, all of a sudden. Their last cup of tea.

  No man is a good man. Her mother’s words. He is just a man.

  She turns around. She looks at the colour on the walls. It’s the same colour as the old flannel she would bathe her mother with. An only child. So much responsibility in the end.

  Wow. It really is small.

  She stretches out her arms. She can touch both sides of the walls in both directions with the palm of her hands. She could, with fingers splayed, have a thumb on where she’d left and little finger on where she’d come to on the map. It’d not seemed so far on paper.

  How in the hell did you bring up kids here?

  We did.

  When he speaks, he smokes, the air is so cold. She catches it with her hands, warms it, blows it back to him. This was not how she’d imagined it.

  He is behind her now. She can feel the nettles on the back of her neck. She brushes him off.

  Stop it. I’ve only just walked in.

  She picks up a kettle, stainless steel and heavy with water.

  Cup of tea?

  He does not answer. He is looking for more wine.

  You’ve been drinking all day, haven’t you?

  He does not answer that either.

  She knows better than to ask him again.

  You got what you wanted.

  Perhaps. But now she’s not so sure.

  She finds mugs, tea-stained and dusty. Turns on the tap at the sink and runs her fingers under the water.

  Is there any hot water?

  The water runs cold.

  Is there no hot water?

  He has found wine. Red. He unscrews the cap, returns to the table to fill his glass.

  No hot water at all?

  She thinks about this. Then of the nettles. She will need hot water, she says. A bath, at least. He gestures towards the log burner behind him. It is heavy, black and silent; lifts an iron kettle off a stand and places it on the top.

  Hot water, he says.

  She sucks in her breath.

  No. It’s not properly sealed. I’ll boil the kettle instead.

  ~

  The kettle in the kitchen is over-boiling. She turns it off at the wall. The kitchen is full of smoke. She thinks about opening the door but she’s not ready to let the outside in. She stands in the steam and closes her eyes. There is a smell, suddenly, like open flesh, and she looks down at the floor.

  What’s that s
mell?

  He is at the log burner, filling it with sticks.

  Can you smell it?

  He strikes a match. Throws it onto the sticks.

  God, what is that smell?

  He bends down to blow on the sticks.

  Can’t you smell it?

  He looks up from the log burner with sooty hands. She stares at his hands for so long they no longer look part of his body.

  You were asked not to light it, she says. They begged you not to light it. Why didn’t you do as you were told?

  She goes back into the kitchen and drops two teabags into the two mugs she has swilled with cold water. She lifts the kettle. The water that comes out is brown. Black bits float in it. Like petals drooping at an unattended grave. She lifts the lid off the kettle, screams and drops it to the floor. Screams again because she is scalded. Kicks the kettle. It hits Michael in the shin.

  There is something in the kettle boiled to death and the kitchen is filled with smoke.

  You’re on fire, she says.

  Warm your hands on me, then.

  But when she touches him he is so cold, her hands go right through him.

  They curl up on the settee in the little front room. The open fire cackles. They drink more wine. He has forgotten about the nettles and she has scalded her foot. A dampened tea towel is wrapped around it. A blister she will have to burst come morning.

  I can’t believe you all actually lived here, she says. It’s so small. It’s like we’ve been buried into the hill.

  He watches the fire.

  It’s all so big to a kid. We were never in anyway. We lived out there.