by Kate Hamer
‘You look like you’ve got thinner. Come on, come into the kitchen and I’ll make something, and the grass can be our afters.’ He picks up the joint and tucks it behind his ear.
I follow him, holding my cardigan shut, my bare feet padding on the floor. I perch on a stool at the kitchen counter, prop my elbows there and watch as he prepares the meal. He chops an onion and then cloves of garlic into a translucent pile on the blue plastic chopping board. Then he takes a greaseproof-wrapped parcel of mince from the fridge. He stands a metal contraption that looks about a hundred years old next to it.
‘Ever had home-made hamburgers?’
‘Uh, no.’
‘My mum taught me how to make them when I was a kid. She spent time out in the States when she was young and she said everyone does it out there. She said if you eat the ones you buy frozen in the supermarket you may as well be eating a dog turd.’
With one part of my mind I see him there, as a kid, kneeling up on a chair next to her as she shows him how to pack the mixture in the machine and bring down the handle to press it flat. See him wrinkling his nose when she talks about eating dog shit. See her showing him how to use a knife safely. I feel the whole weight of love that’s happened in the room. I had that too, I did. I don’t forget that, despite the fact it had to end and that was no one’s fault. If there’s ever a point where I might be a mother – though I know what would have to happen first with Mum to make that possible – I want to be like that, like one huge towering unbreakable pillar of strength for my child.
But another part of my brain is thinking, What the fuck, Grace? What the fuck do you think you’re doing down here so far away from home? I pour myself another dose of vodka to shut that voice up.
We eat sloppy hamburgers at the kitchen counter; slices of pickle fall onto my plate and I scoop them up and eat them, and it’s delicious. I had no idea how hungry I was. No idea at all. I laugh at things Daniel says, only half listening, and bathing in the sounds coming up off the street. Cars, and people calling out to each other on their way home, the sounds here so much more distinct than on our level where they arrive in whispers, tattered into threads on their journey upwards. But then I’m putting the corner of my hamburger down, the bun indented with my finger marks, and I’m gradually turning silent, although Daniel hasn’t realised yet because he’s in full flow and he’s saying, ‘Maybe you should think about yourself for once, Grace.’ He lights the joint, takes a deep inhale and passes it over to me, and I shake my head and he still doesn’t shut up. ‘What’s going to happen in the next five years, Grace? You look peaky, Grace. I worry about you, Grace. You look so tired sometimes.’ I see that he’s a bit drunk. That he was probably drinking before I arrived. I take the joint out of his fingers, take a deep draw, then stub it out in the ashtray.
‘Finished?’
He blinks at me. ‘What?’
‘I asked if you’d quite finished or if there’s more where that came from.’
I punch my fist on the counter top and the plates and cutlery rattle.
He spreads his hands. ‘Now then. I didn’t mean, honestly, Grace. There’s no need.’
‘What do you know anyway?’
‘Nothing. I know nothing. I’m so sorry, Grace. I’m sorry I said all that, I really am, but, it’s just, I care for you. Now I’ve gone and said all the wrong things and offended you.’
‘You have no right.’ And before I know it I’m crying great huge heaving sobs like some stupid bitch out on the street who’s drunk too much and lost her phone and argued with her boyfriend. I turn to run out of the room and I realise drool is coming out of the corner of my mouth and I draw the back of my hand across to wipe it away.
‘Grace, stop it.’ I hear Daniel behind me and I know that maybe he did cross the line, but I’m behaving like a real fucking stupid hysterical little bitch. When he comes up behind and puts his arms around me and pins my arms to my body like he’s afraid I’m going to hurt myself, I just sort of lean back into him and we move to the bedroom, which is also exactly what I knew would happen when I first looked up at the peephole of my flat door and thought about rolling myself up like a tube and threading through it.
Then I feel him resisting, pulling away. ‘We don’t have to,’ he says softly, and I say, ‘I know.’
We fall into each other and it’s nothing like anything before. The few boyfriends I’ve had, whatever I did with them, was not something that would occur to me to miss or to want again. I hardly even remember it. Not like this, I think, as sleep descends; this is something I will never forget as long as I live.
*
When I wake the ceiling is pimpled like newsprint even though there’s light trickling under the slats of the window blinds. My thinking flicks about, trying to identify what’s happened and where I am. When I stir there’s a soreness between my legs that isn’t unpleasant, not unpleasant at all, because there’s good memories attached to it that somehow slightly elude me. I roll heavy limbs to my side and see an arm flung across the pillow, and after a second or two I identify it as belonging to Daniel.
I sit bolt upright. ‘Shitting hell.’
He stirs beside me. I swing my legs over and my feet slap on the cold floor. ‘Shitting hell. What time is it? Where are my clothes?’ I see them strewn over the floor and make a dive for them.
Daniel’s arm shoots out and scoops his phone off the bedside cabinet. He brings it close to his face and squints. ‘S’all right.’ There’s a clack as his tongue peels away from the roof of his mouth. His voice is porridgy with sleep. ‘It’s only eight-thirty.’
A bolt of dread and anxiety spirals through me. ‘Eight-thirty? Christ. Christ, that’s an hour after I should be …’ I twist myself into my shirt and pull my jeans up, not bothering with underwear.
‘Grace, calm down.’ Daniel is sitting up now and rubbing his eyes.
‘I can’t,’ I say over my shoulder as I run out of the flat. I pound at the button beside the lift but it’s having one of its slow days. The noise coming from inside is like someone’s grumbling innards.
I take to the stairs, sprinting as hard as I can. The alcohol and spliff from last night is slowing me down but I force myself, ignoring the stitch in my side, taking big gasps of air and running up flight after flight until I see our own front door and the flat blank eye in it. I think it looks blinded, like something terrible has gone on inside.
The key? I grope to recall, then remember the feel of the smooth way it tucked into my back pocket. I thrust a hand into each pocket and feel about, getting more and more desperate and practically pulling my jeans off because, with a mounting, sick realisation, I understand that it’s not there.
I take the steps two at a time, nearly tumbling down the stairwell, until I arrive panting at Daniel’s door. He seems to take an age to answer.
‘Come on, come on.’ I pound again and he opens it, barefoot in jeans and a T-shirt, and I push past him on into the bedroom and get down on my hands and knees and start using my hands like they’re fucking landmine sweepers.
He appears at the doorway. ‘What are you doing?’
‘Key,’ I gasp. ‘Help me.’
‘What?’
I kneel up. ‘My front door key. It must’ve fallen out of my back pocket. Please, please help me find it.’
He drops down next to me and begins groping around the carpet and flipping up the duvet so he can get under the bed.
‘Grace, is it really necessary to be so anxious? I mean—’
‘Please, just help me. Please just do that. I know what she’s like. She will have tried to get herself up with me not there. She thinks she can do it but she can’t, and she won’t accept it. Now please, please, I’m begging you, just help me find that key.’ I’m crying now and he crawls to the other side of the bed to look.
‘Not here.’ He stands up and opens up the blind and scans the floor. ‘There.’ He points and I see a glint of silver and I pounce. Somehow it’s got itself wedged in betwee
n the carpet and the skirting board. I prise it out with my fingers, crying out when it slips from my fingertips back into its crevice and I scrabble after it again. When I have it I palm it so hard it cuts into my skin.
‘Don’t follow me,’ I say, terrified at the thought of someone else seeing. ‘I need to go and sort this out on my own.’
He puts his hands out. ‘It’ll be fine.’ And that’s the last sight of him, through the doorway, holding out his hands and telling me everything will be all right before I trip and fall on the staircase, then pick myself up and run so hard my breath is a ragged ribbon being pulled through my chest.
It’s hard to unlock the door because my hands are trembling and when I kick it open I stand in the hallway, panting, and it’s like the look of the front door, everything in the flat, is angled wrong as in a nightmare because it knows something terrible has happened here.
I sprint towards Mum’s bedroom saying, ‘Sorry, sorry, sorry, sorry, sorry. I’m just so, so sorry,’ as I run, and when I fling open the door I see what I knew I would see from the moment I woke up, and that is Mum’s damaged frail body in its pink and white rose-sprigged nightie lying in a broken heap on the floor.
The staircase is a red puzzle above and below. I have the sensation of the step as if I’m standing on a swing so I sit down abruptly. Downstairs there’s a murmuring voice. I peer between the dark wood of the banister and see the top of her head from above. She’s put her jumper back on and she paces back and forth, talking quietly into her phone. I steal a little further down to see if I can hear. By now I’m close enough to catch a word or two. ‘Unbearable.’ ‘Never before.’ ‘Urgent.’ ‘The place where no one goes.’ At one point she yells down the phone, ‘It’s too late for that.’
Act II
THE DEEP
11
Phoebe
The Beloved has returned.
The Beloved – my sister Verity – arrives for the holidays from her university in York. She sits there on the end of the sofa with her and they both bare their teeth at me. It’s a hundred times worse when The Beloved’s here because they are like some unstoppable two-headed monster. They’ll eat me alive and I’ll end up in their shared stomach, being digested by their acid.
‘Phoebe. Can’t you try and get along with your big sister a bit better?’ Dad asks.
Why can’t he see it? Why can’t he see how they are with me?
Because he doesn’t want to. He wants everything smooth and easy and polite. He can’t stand upset or trouble.
The Beloved has her feet tucked up beneath her bottom. She leans against our mother in affection, snuggling her cheek against her shoulder.
I turn to go.
‘Off out?’ asks The Beloved, sneeringly. For some reason, The Beloved takes it as her intrinsic right to interrogate me as much as she does.
I swing back. I stand, silent, deliberately on display.
I understand how the light from the window will be catching the curves of my face. I’m fully aware how my hip bone will be appearing, jutting forward, just so in my black jeans. The effect will be spare and elegant. This one thing never fails. By doing this, I can demonstrate definitively, absolutely, that I am unequivocally the one that got all the looks, and there’s nothing, short of throwing acid in my face, they can do about it. The Beloved’s own face is unformed. Her colouring is muddy and her body rounded in an unpleasingly unhealthy child way. My mother is up now and messing with the TV stand in preparation for their night’s entertainment. Little bowls of nuts and crisps await on the coffee table.
‘Look at you,’ The Beloved says softly. ‘Your jeans look practically spray-painted on and that purple eye make-up makes you look like a street walker.’
She catches the end of the conversation and looks up.
‘Verity’s right.’
They copy each other by staying barefaced and make-up free. I’m sure The Beloved would love to cover up that face with cosmetics but she pretends to like being ‘natural’. I think it makes them both feel morally superior. I don’t care. I wet my fingers and scrabble at my eyes, wiping it off. When I’m done I catch the glance from The Beloved, the sick jealousy in it, and I realise that naked-faced I look even better than before and she regrets saying anything.
Our mother returns to the sofa and they take up their positions once more. As The Beloved looks up at me she closes her lips and pulls them tight across her teeth. She leans in closer to her as if for protection. Then, and only then, am I able to leave with a sense of triumph, to leave them huddled together in the living room upstairs and go down to the front door. Once I’m there I decide to take my coat because I can see mist pushing on the outside of the window.
‘You didn’t say where you were going, Phoebe. It’s nearly twilight out there.’ She’s come out of the living room and is standing at the top of the stairs. Her shadow grows long until her head is on the bottom stair, upside down.
I make my voice conciliatory. ‘Orla’s asked me to hang out,’ I lie. ‘She’s got some new jacket she wants to show me.’
‘OK.’ She pauses. I can tell she’s torn between refusing me and wanting to be alone with The Beloved. I taint it for them, skulking around the perimeters. I spoil their together time.
‘Orla’s asked me to stay, so I might even do that,’ I drop in. Normally, such casualness wouldn’t be allowed. I should make the most of it. I take the chance that they’re too wrapped up in each other that checking phone calls won’t be made.
‘Mum, it’s coming on.’ It’s The Beloved from the living room. There’s the sound of the TV in the background.
She turns on her heel and walks away. Her shadow-head bounces up the stairs, one at a time.
Outside, as I slope down the hill, my confidence fades. I’m so scared. I’m so fucking scared all the time. I’ll do anything to relieve it. I chatter to the moon through the glass of my bedroom window. I ask it to be my mother and look after me. I polish its shine in my mind so its rays can continue to protect me the next day when it has been wheeled away from me across the sky.
My wish at the wishing bowl to become Queen of the House made me feel wonderful for a time. It felt real, as if by commanding so it would come true; I believed it completely. I could feel it strengthening me inside like after a sickness when you start to become well. Then The Beloved came and the idea of being Queen of the House began being smashed up piece by piece until now I’m just a spider scuttling around in their presence. It’s worse than ever.
That little show I just put on. I know how people look, how they’re mesmerised by my shine. It sickens me really. Such a sham. Like I’m wearing a dress that doesn’t really belong to me. There’s rot inside which one day will eat away at that face and then everyone will see. I don’t even long to bump into Mr Jonasson like I normally do when I’m out. I wouldn’t be up to seeing him right now. The urge to ring Paul and find out where he is and whether he’s got anything becomes like another sickness the longing is so great. I press his number almost hoping he doesn’t answer. When he doesn’t I hesitate, then ring Orla.
‘Meet me,’ I whisper into the phone, even though there is no one around.
‘Umm. I don’t know.’
‘Meet me,’ I say again, trying to make it sound like a command.
She sighs. ‘OK. I’ll see you on the square outside the Roman Baths,’ and I wonder what’s made her so reluctant.
Sometimes I think, Dear Pussy-cat face, look at me so radiant and well. However did the pack of you believe I needed a cure? Look how easily I swirl my hair into a top knot, glitter my eyes, eat a pastry, laugh, study complicated algorithms, sigh.
Other times, like now, my little internal letter to her can backfire. Let the thoughts pass, she said. Ha! Dear Pussy-cat face, I am so very unwell. There’s an oozing feeling down the back of my head that won’t go away. I have the urge to shout at strangers. Escape seems impossible yet I attempt it all the same. Food is a constant issue. I can still feel the chop from l
ast night weighing me down like a stone. The thoughts I keep having of the day of Macbeth and the murder and the splattering blood are like a train with endless carriages: as soon as one leaves another shows up. They go: Do it again, go on.
And I plunge into mist that gets thicker and thicker the lower down the hill into town I go.
*
Orla doesn’t look particularly pleased to see me and my stomach churns. She’s the one person I can usually rely on. She’s hunched in her middle-aged short camel coat against the unseasonal cold. It’s been so hot you feel the contrast quickly. The fog has probably come snaking down the river; that’s what usually happens, even in summer. A few tourists amble out of it and look up to the outside of the Roman Baths to where you can see the statues pointing towards the main bath inside. Tonight they are dark shapes in the fog. I suck up my breath and smile.
‘What are we going to do then?’ she asks snippily.
I manage to smile again. I need to win her back. ‘I just wanted to get out. Come on. Let’s go and have a cider in The Flute, on me. You can go to the bar, though. They’ll ask me for ID and you look older than me. I’ll hide around the corner.’ I silently hope I have the funds to cover a pint and a half of cider.
I walk behind her, touching the sides of buildings as we go for support. They feel grainy under my fingers.
I sit at the scarred, sticky wooden table thinking yet again of Macbeth while she’s at the bar. When I’m feeling good I feel I could be like the witches: ferocious, lording it over everybody with their second sight and how they don’t need what everybody else needs – food, a house.
Bad days like today I’m Macbeth, shivering and terrified. It all turns into badness after the beginning. That play is cancer. It started all this off again, I’m sure of it. It should be banned and every copy burned on a pyre where the flames lick against the sky. It is not for the tender mind. It’s not even only me that thinks so. In the theatre the actors and all the people putting on plays won’t even utter its name. They call it ‘The Scottish Play’ instead because they think it’s such bad luck. Mr Jonasson told us that. Just the thought of him popping into my head makes me woozy with want.
