Midland

by James Flint

  ‘I think that makes us honours even,’ Tony had smiled while they’d packed their kit away. ‘I got a handle on those drop shots of yours this week. You rely on them a bit too much, you know. Leaves you vulnerable. You want to mix it up a bit more. Use more of the court.’

  ‘Thanks,’ Miles said. ‘Good tip.’

  He was now the angry one. It was one thing to be bullied into throwing a match, quite another to be patronised about it. Positive now that the solicitor’s letter had been a subtle piece of gamesmanship, he resolved to win their next encounter come what may. But when they met again his irritation affected his focus and Tony confidently dispatched him.

  ‘Still relying too much on those drop shots,’ was the comment, which left Miles seething. But an opportunity for further redress never came, as Tony found an excuse to cancel the next Saturday, and the next, and after that life moved on. They didn’t play again, and nor did Miles ever hear another peep from Tony’s solicitor.

  At the time he had refrained from mentioned this little psychodrama to Margaret, as she would almost certainly have told him that he was being paranoid. She was ready to forgive Nolan anything, he wasn’t sure why – as far as Miles could see he’d been as much of a bastard to her as he was to everyone else. Anyway, the habits of former partners were not something one really discussed, not when one valued one’s marital harmony.

  The only time he’d ever seen her be really angry with him was the night that Sheila had shown up at their house in a terrible state with that big bruise under her eye. It had stuck in his mind because it had been Emily’s birthday, and he’d had to do most of the clearing up from her little party himself while Margaret comforted wife number two in the guest room upstairs. What had Emily been? Ten, maybe? Yes, that must be right, because she hadn’t yet started at Wardle’s. Miles remembered the balloons. Helium ones, filled from a canister they’d bought, floating all over the living-room ceiling. The prettiest things, even if they did remind him of the barrage balloons sent up over Birmingham like Flash Gordon rocket ships to deflect the waves of Heinkel bombers. Though maybe those were filled with hydrogen, not helium. That must have been one of his earliest memories – amazing he could still remember them, more than sixty years on. But he could. He would have been Rufus’s age. Just goes to show. Life sticks to you. He hoped Emily would remember her birthday balloons when she was his age. He’d read somewhere, in the Telegraph probably, that we were running out of helium. It was an element, so not something you could make, and once the Earth’s stock had been used up, they weren’t going to be able to get any more of it. Who’d have thought it? No more party balloons – you wouldn’t want to put hydrogen in those. No more barrage balloons, either, hopefully. Dark days, those had been. Very dark.

  —————

  Emily had offered to make dinner that night, so as evening approached she found herself in her parents’ kitchen laying out a set of worn placemats decorated with watercolours of Calcutta street scenes from 1785, not long after the city had become the capital of British India. To these she added three wash-worn linen napkins; various items of stainless steel cutlery; three scratched silver coasters backed with battered cork; and a selection of tumblers from the assortment in the cupboard over the dishwasher.

  While she was laying the table she switched on the radio. It was tuned to Radio 4. It was always tuned to Radio 4: the volume dial was polished with use, the tuning dial tarnished by time. The six o’clock pips blipped out of the little speakers and carried the world into the room, and immediately Emily’s stomach started to rumble: so many of her childhood meals had been cued in by this sound that she’d developed a Pavlovian response to it. She took an apple from the fruit bowl and bit out a chunk, and at the same time reached into the vegetable rack and retrieved a brown bag of potatoes, which she carried over to the sink.

  Though not yet green, the potatoes were soft with age. There would be more in the pantry, dug from the rows behind the house by the gardener in the autumn, then left to slowly rot for want of mouths to eat them. Why her mother still bothered Emily really didn’t know. It was another family idiosyncrasy, like the ability to persist as if there was only one media outlet in the country rather than a cacophonous ecology of satellite, broadband and digital.

  While she scrubbed and peeled she listened to the news. There was an item on the whale that had swum up the Thames, followed by a brief discussion about the plan to put its skeleton on show. She filled a pan with water from the filter tap, dosed it with salt, and slid the woody knuckles of potato in from off the chopping board. As she set the pan on the hot ring of the Aga, two hands to carry it carefully across the room, one foot to shift the dog that lay, spine extended, along the warm base of the oven, the doorbell – which was just that, a bell, welded to an ancient spring and operated by a wire threaded through the house’s beams – jangled on its hinge.

  The noise was bright and pleasing.

  Emily dried her hands on the wrong towel and walked out of the kitchen, across the flags of the back hallway, and onto the parquet of the front hall. She half-expected her mother back from the shop, hands full of something, lips mouthing the latest episode in some developing village catastrophe. But it would have been odd for Margaret to use the front door: except for formal occasions the family came and went by way of the door at the side of the house, the one off the breakfast room.

  Her hunch was right. Another woman stood in the porch, a slender, drawn young woman not quite Emily’s age, a woman that Emily was not quite prepared to see. Light from the leaded glass standard lamp that illuminated the hallway caught her highlights and picked up the green of her eyes. She was tall, slender, had her father’s lips, her mother’s nose.

  It was Caitlin.

  ‘Hello!’ Emily said, trying to hit a note somewhere between pleasant surprise and sympathetic concern. ‘How are you?’

  ‘Oh, I’m okay.’

  ‘I looked for you at the vigil.’

  ‘Yes – Sean said. I’m sorry. I was getting some rest.’

  ‘You were up last night, weren’t you?’

  Caitlin gave a faint wince. ‘That’s right. I – is your mum here?’

  ‘Mum? Not right now. She just popped down to the shop to get a couple of things before they close. She’ll be back in a minute. Please, come in.’

  ‘Okay.’

  Caitlin stepped into the panelled hall and Emily led her past the doors to the living room, drawing room, study and conservatory, then underneath the staircase and through into the kitchen, the house’s control centre and the necessary setting for any serious conversation.

  ‘Fancy a glass of wine? I’ve just opened a bottle.’

  ‘That’d be nice.’

  At the sight of a visitor the dogs waggled happily. Harry jumped up, dark paws against Caitlin’s pale trousers, so Emily shooed him and Pandora out of the second back door, the one that led from the kitchen proper to the vegetable garden, before pouring out two drinks.

  On the Aga the potato water was beginning to steam.

  ‘I’m really sorry about your dad.’

  ‘Thanks.’

  ‘Did everything go okay today? Mum said the church was packed.’

  ‘There were a lot of people there. Dad knew everyone.’

  ‘Alex and Matthew are both coming back, you know. For the weekend.’

  ‘Are they?’

  ‘They thought Mum might need the moral support.’

  ‘Is she okay about it?’

  ‘I think so. I mean her and Tony … it was a long time ago.’

  ‘Right. It was. What about you, did you come back too?’

  ‘Me? No. I was here anyway. I’m kind of between jobs. And flats. So I’ve moved back in for a bit while I sort myself out.’

  Just then the dogs began to bark: they had heard Margaret’s car pull up at the side of the house and they knew that her return meant food. Emily probed the potatoes, decided that they were done, carried them to the sink and dumped them
into a colander. Behind her, Caitlin sat down at the unlaid end of the table, next to that week’s as yet unopened edition of the Birmingham Post.

  Margaret saw her as soon as she came into the breakfast room.

  ‘Oh,’ she said, stopping momentarily. ‘Caitlin. So it’s your car then, out the front?’

  ‘Hello Mrs Wold,’ Caitlin managed, her words obscured by the noise of the dogs.

  ‘For goodness’ sake call me Margaret,’ said Margaret, who was still dressed in the navy jacket and pleated cream skirt she’d worn for the funeral. ‘Are you staying for supper? There’s plenty to eat. Lay an extra place for Caitlin, Emily. Oh – what did you do to your hand?’

  Caitlin rubbed the large, untidy dressing taped into the V between her left thumb and forefinger. ‘That? Nothing. It’s just a burn. You know – cooking oil.’

  ‘That doesn’t sound very good. Burns can be so painful! Are you sure it’s all right? We’ve got some very good cream if you need it.’

  ‘No, really, it’s fine.’

  ‘Well if you need anything do say.’

  Margaret began to bustle around the kitchen as if this was seventeen years earlier and Caitlin’s mother had been late collecting her daughter after the school run. She retested the potatoes, seemed satisfied that they were cooked, transferred them into a bowl and then began to unload things from the fridge onto the kitchen table with brisk efficiency.

  ‘There’s salad and quiche and cold beef and some pork pie if you like. Or are you a vegetarian as well, these days? I can’t think why Emily is. I really cannot understand it. It seems like such a silly way to live your life. You always struck me as far too sensible a girl to go in for those kinds of fads. Miles! Supper!’

  She stopped, and smiled, and then suddenly sat in one of the chairs as tears rolled down her face.

  ‘Mum …’ said Emily, not quite sure how to react.

  Margaret shook her head and pressed the thumb and little finger of her right hand against the lower rims of her eyes.

  ‘I know he was an old sod, but I still had a soft spot for him.’

  Caitlin took a box of tissues from the windowsill and offered them to Margaret, who took one, folded it, and used it rather daintily to wipe her nose. She was not a dainty woman, but she had grown up with a particular ideal of feminine beauty, and it was one that she still aspired to.

  She sniffed and let out a kind of soft chuckle. ‘I’m so silly. It should be you crying, not me. Oh, let those wretched dogs in will you, Emily, before they completely wreck the door?’

  While Emily complied, Margaret turned to address Caitlin. ‘How are you anyway, dear? How’s your poor mother? Is she bearing up? I’m sure she’s overwhelmed, poor thing, with the funeral and everything else to organise.’

  There was a pause while Caitlin stared into her wine.

  ‘Actually, that’s sort of why I’m here. Things are a bit … weird, what with Jamie back from South America and everything.’

  ‘Oh,’ said Margaret. ‘Yes. I thought I saw him at the church.’

  ‘He flew in this morning. We had a bit of a row when everyone got home. It started off about the will, and then Jamie started saying awful things about Dad. And then Mum and Sean got angry.’ Caitlin paused and Emily thought she might now need the tissues, but her eyes stayed dry. ‘Anyway, I just wanted to ask if I could stay here for a day or two, while Mum and Jamie sort it out. I just really think I need a bit of space from everyone.’

  —————

  A tartan rug lay folded over the lower half of the second divan in the guest bedroom, the one nearer the window. Caitlin had never liked tartan unless it was the Burberry kind, in which case it was okay if a bit trashy. But the other bed was encased in a pale green satin counterpane, sheeny as plastic and about as antiseptic, and of the two the one with the rug looked the more inviting.

  She sat quietly for a while, listening. Downstairs there was noise: footsteps on the flags and parquet, the dogs skittering about, doors opening and closing. But there were no voices, or none that she could hear. It would be just like the Wolds to be too polite to discuss her while she was a guest in their house.

  She allowed herself a smile at this, her first smile for quite some time. Then – an unpleasant feeling.

  Someone – or something – was watching her.

  It was a teddy bear. It was sitting in a cane chair positioned against the wall beside the door, which explained why she hadn’t seen it when she’d first come in. One eye was missing but the other buttoned her neatly onto her rectangle of rug.

  A buzz of recognition. Ochre fur in the half-light.

  ‘Hello,’ she said. ‘You’ve lost an eye since we last met.’ She went over, picked it up, inhaled its scent of bark and cloves. Somewhere in its belly an antiquated voice box performed a somersault and groaned.

  Maaaaaawww.

  ‘Poor old thing. Still alive, if only just.’

  Buried beneath that cornflake-coloured fur, caught among the hessian and wood shavings and colonies of dust mites, were memories of her and Matthew, lying side by side in afternoon sunshine on a bed in the room next door one afternoon when his parents had been out.

  She’d teased him about the bear.

  ‘Seventeen and still need a teddy?’

  ‘It’s a family heirloom,’ he’d grumped in reply. ‘It’s worth a great deal of money.’

  She’d said something about his liking to be watched, and he’d laughed and pushed her back and started to kiss her.

  The bear’s one-eyed stare was a wink. I know what you did, it said. I wasn’t there, but I know.

  She couldn’t stand it. A large lace doily lay across the dresser, protecting its veneer from dust; she picked it up and draped it over the toy’s stuffed head. But that just made it worse. The teddy now looked like a Pac-Man ghost with the additional feature of two stubby teddy-bear legs. Snatching back the cloth, she grabbed the bear by an arm and carried it over to the wardrobe, the odour of naphthalene blooming out as she pulled open the door. There, bear: go in there – with the phantom ball of long-forgotten shoes, out-of-fashion dresses and suits for a younger, more slender edition of Miles: former selves parcelled up in a row of polythene shrouds. In there. That’s where you belong. Not out here staring at me.

  Caitlin then went and sat, this second time, not back on the bed but in the chair by the dresser. By removing the doily she had revealed a polished surface in which she could see her face. She reached for her bag, took out a pack of cigarettes, and from inside the pack retrieved a tiny envelope of plain white paper. She opened this carefully and knocked a little pile of chalky powder onto the veneer.

  A dune by the sea. Sand falling into the base of an hourglass.

  Again into her bag for a short length of cocktail straw. A glance in the oval mirror on the back of the dresser, canted slightly upwards on its horizontal hinge. There she was, drawn but defiant, and behind her the wardrobe. More mirrors here, the two doors panelled with bevelled rectangles of silvered glass, the metal backing starting to pucker and speck in the corners. In the reflected reflection she could see her shoulder blades and the dome of the back of her head. Angular. Anonymous. Vulnerable.

  That fucking bear was still watching her.

  She got up, strode across to the cupboard, and pulled open the door. Polythene and naphthalene. The bear winked then groaned in protest as she turned it round to face the other way.

  She shut the door, returned to the dresser and contemplated the small heap of powder. There had been many such heaps, but she could keep on turning the hourglass for ever.

  Could she? Couldn’t she?

  The bear. Polythene and naphthalene.

  I can still see you. I know what you did. Wink, wink.

  On a sudden impulse Caitlin swept the powder off the dresser and onto the carpet then strode over to the basin in the corner. She spun the mottled faucets, rinsed off the white crust that frosted the blade of her hand and washed away what was left in the w
rap. That was all that she had. There wouldn’t be any more. She had made up her mind.

  Stooping, trying to avoid wetting the dressing that covered her burn, she splashed the cold water onto her face. It felt right. She looked in the mirror, a third mirror – this room was a hall of them – fixed to the wall over the splash back. Hollows and points, plastic points. Purple mussel shells beneath her eyes. No sleep last night. Or the previous. She pulled the skin taut.

  It would all be all right.

  Then … a flash of gold behind her, something scything past the legs of the chair she’d just vacated.

  It was the larger of the two dogs. He’d sneaked into the room and was licking at the patch where she’d spilled the cocaine.

  ‘Get off!’ she hissed. The dog shot her his best bad-puppy grin. Were his eyes already starting to dilate?

  She lunged for him but he pogo-ed past her and back out through the door he’d nosed open, launching himself at terrific speed down the main staircase and past Margaret, who was on her way up with a stack of clean sheets in her arms.

  ‘Harry, what on earth are you doing? You know you shouldn’t be up here.’ She could see, as she negotiated the landing, that Caitlin’s door was wide open. ‘Has he been bothering you Caitlin? If he has I’ll shut him out.’

  ‘It’s all right, Margaret, really. He’s just playing.’ Caitlin’s voice quavered slightly. She’d been there less than two hours and was already doping the family pet. Good effort.

  Below her Harry clattered through the hallway and galloped into the kitchen, where he instantly infected a dozing Pandora with his chemical excitement. They made a circuit out of the central unit, nearly knocked Emily over, and then shot back into the hall where a skidded turn across the parquet catapulted them into the conservatory. Across the tiles and through the metal-framed French doors they went, then on into the drawing room where a large Chinese-washed rug the colour of green tea absorbed the sound of their claws for a couple of seconds before they crossed back into the hall.