by Rachel Joyce
When he discovered his mother alone in the kitchen, Byron had to pretend he had run a long way, he was so frightened. ‘Where’s Father?’
‘He went back to London. He had work to do.’
‘He didn’t examine the Jaguar?’
She made a face as if she didn’t understand. ‘Why would he do that? He took a taxi to the station.’
‘Why didn’t you drive him?’
‘I don’t know. There wasn’t time. You’re asking a lot of questions, sweetheart.’
She fell silent and he was afraid she was upset until she turned to sprinkle the air with a flutter of soap bubbles. Laughing, Byron caught them in his fingers and she slipped another, like a white button, on the end of his nose. Without his father, the house felt soft again.
The Christmas party had been Seymour’s idea. It came several months after the incident with the pond. It was time to show those school parents a thing or two, he said. There were special invitations on white card. Diana had bought a tree so tall it touched the plaster ceiling of the hallway. She strung up paper chains, polished the wood panelling, piped fillings into vol-au-vent cases, and skewered maraschino cherries with cocktail sticks. Everyone had come, even Andrea Lowe and her QC husband.
He was a taciturn man in a velvet jacket and a dicky bow who trailed his wife with her glass and her canapé in a paper napkin.
Diana had handed out glasses from her hostess trolley and all the guests admired the new under-floor heating, the kitchen units, the avocado bathroom suites, the fitted bedroom cupboards, the electric fireplaces and the double-glazed windows. It had been Byron’s job to take coats.
‘New money,’ he heard a mother say. And Byron supposed that was a good thing now there was decimal coinage. His father was passing as the woman made her remark and Byron wondered if he would be happy too, only he seemed to discover something unpleasant in his mushroom vol au vent. Seymour’s face collapsed; but he had never liked vegetables without meat.
Later in the evening, Deirdre Watkins had suggested a party game; Byron remembered this too, although his witnessing of the event was now restricted to a vantage point at the top of the stairs. ‘Oh yes, a party game,’ his mother had laughed. She was kind like that. And despite the fact that Byron’s father was not a gamey sort of person, not unless you counted solitaire or a very difficult crossword, the guests had agreed a party game would be tremendous fun and he had been forced to concur. He was the host after all.
His father had blindfolded Diana a little roughly, Byron felt, but she didn’t complain. The game was, his father said, that she should find him. ‘My wife likes games. Don’t you, Diana?’ Sometimes Byron felt his father overshot being a jolly person. You had a better sense of him if he were giving his views about the Common Market or the Channel Tunnel. (He was against both.) But by now the drawing room was heaving with grownups, all laughing and drinking and calling to his mother as she groped and flapped and tripped her way after them.
‘Seymour?’ she kept calling. ‘Where are you?’
She touched the cheeks and hair and shoulders of men who were not her husband. ‘Oh no,’ she’d say. ‘Goodness, you’re not Seymour.’ And the crowd would laugh. Even Andrea Lowe managed a smile.
Shaking his head as if tired, or hurt, or maybe even bored, it was hard to tell which, his father had left. No one saw, only Byron. But still Diana kept searching, sometimes crushed against the crowd, sometimes passed from one to another by it, like a ball, or a doll, everyone laughing and jeering, almost knocking her into the Christmas tree once, while she kept looking for Byron’s father with her fluttering, outstretched hands.
It was the last party his parents had held. His father said if there was ever another, it would be over his dead body. This did not seem to Byron an altogether inviting place to hold a party. But remembering it, and the feeling of sickness, of confusion, that had swamped him as he watched his mother carried like driftwood, he wished again she had kept quiet about the new Jaguar.
On Sunday night, Byron moved his sheet and quilt on to the floor. He set his torch and magnifying glass at his side, in case of emergencies. He saw there was hardship ahead, and even though it would not involve death or starvation, it was important to know that he could endure and make the best of things. At first the quilt seemed surprisingly thick and soft; he was delighted that enduring was so easy. It just didn’t seem very easy to sleep at the same time.
The heat didn’t help. Byron lay on top of the covers and unbuttoned his pyjama top. He was beginning to doze when the bells struck ten across Cranham Moor and he was awake again. He heard his mother switch off her music in the living room and her slight footsteps on the stairs, the click of her bedroom door, and then the stillness that followed. No matter which way he turned, or plumped up his covers, his soft flesh found the hard surfaces. The silence was so loud, he couldn’t think how people slept. He heard the foxes on the moor. He heard the owl, the crickets, and sometimes the house gave a creak, or even a thump. Byron fumbled for his torch and snapped it on and off, on and off, casting its light up and down the walls and curtains, in case there were burglars outside. The familiar shapes of his bedroom leapt in and out of the dark. No matter how hard he tried to close his eyes, all he could think about was danger. He would be bruised all over in the morning.
It was then that Byron understood. In order to save his mother, it wasn’t enough to keep quiet about the Jaguar. It wasn’t enough to endure. He must think what James would do. He must be logical. What he needed was a plan.
8
An Exit
BEYOND THE SUPERMARKET window, the snow cloud looks so heavy it’s a wonder it’s still up in the sky. Jim imagines it collapsing to the moor with a thud. He pictures it punctured open, spilling white over the hills, and he smiles. And then almost as soon as he has that thought, another follows, and he doesn’t know why but this second one is like a jab in the solar plexus. He can hardly breathe.
Despite the years he has lost, sometimes a memory flies back. It can be very small, the detail that sparks a piece of his past. Glancing at it, another person might not look twice. And yet an insignificant detail can zoom out of its ordinary setting and induce such sorrow he feels twisted inside.
It was a winter afternoon like this, long ago, when they discharged him from Besley Hill the first time. He was nineteen. There was a powdery capping of snow on the moor. He stood watching it from the window while the duty nurse fetched his suitcase and then his blue gaberdine coat. He had to wrestle to fit the coat round his shoulders. When he tried to find the sleeves, it caught his arms behind his back like a strap and bit into his armpits.
‘It looks as if you’re going to need a bigger size,’ said the nurse, looking up at him. And that was when it occurred to him how long he had been there. She told him to go to the waiting room. He sat alone with the coat on his lap. He folded it into the shape of a small pet and stroked the soft lining. He hadn’t been in the waiting room since they carried him through on the day he arrived and it confused him because he didn’t know any more what he was. He wasn’t a patient; he was better. But he didn’t know yet what that meant exactly. When the nurse reappeared, she looked surprised. ‘How come you’re still here?’ she said.
‘I’m waiting for someone to fetch me.’
She said she was sure his parents would be here soon. She offered Jim a cup of tea.
He was thirsty and he would have liked tea, but he was thinking about his parents and he couldn’t speak. He could hear the nurse singing from the kitchen while she boiled the kettle for herself. It was an easy sound as if everything in her life was all right. He could even hear the little clink of a teaspoon in her mug. He tried to practise things he might talk about with other people. Fishing, for instance. He had overheard the doctors talk about that, just as he had overheard the nurses talk about going to a dance or dating a new boyfriend. He wished he knew about those things. But he could learn. Now that he was better, he could do those things. Fishing and
dating and going to a dance. It was not too late. He was starting again.
At the window the light had begun to fade. The thin showing of snow on the moor glowed a fragile pewter. When the nurse reappeared, she almost jumped. ‘Are you still here?’ she said. ‘I thought you’d gone ages ago.’ She asked if he was cold and he was, the room was ice, but he reassured her he was comfortable. ‘Let me at least make you that cup of tea,’ she said. ‘I’m sure they’ll be here for you any minute.’
While she sang in the kitchen, the truth dawned on him. No one was coming. Of course they weren’t. No one was going to teach him about fishing or inviting a girl to a dance. He didn’t know if it was the room that made him tremble or the new knowledge in his head. He got up and slipped out of the front door. He didn’t want to insult the nurse with his sudden disappearance so he left the coat, neatly folded, in the chair, to show the cup of tea was not for nothing. He kept expecting someone to run out, to take his arm and steer him back inside, but no one did. He walked the length of the drive and since the gates were locked and he didn’t want to trouble the nurse again, he found his way over the wall. After that he walked towards the moor because he had no idea where else to go. He spent days up there, and he didn’t know what he felt, only that he was wrong, a misfit, he was not cured, he was full of blame, he was not like everyone else, until the police found him in his underpants and drove him straight back to Besley Hill.
‘You like those hills,’ says his right ear.
Turning swiftly, Jim finds Eileen behind him. He jumps as if she is contagious. Her orange hat is perched at such a precarious angle to her head it looks on the verge of flying off. She holds a ham sandwich on a plate.
Eileen gives a big frank smile that lifts her whole face. ‘I didn’t mean to shock you,’ she says. ‘It’s an effect I have. Even when I think I’m being not shocking, I still shock people.’ She laughs.
After his previous experience with the smiling, Jim would like to try something different. Maybe he should laugh although he doesn’t want to suggest he’s mocking Eileen or that he agrees she’s shocking. He wants to laugh in the way that she does: a throaty, generous roar. He makes a smile shape and then does a noise.
‘Do you need a glass of water?’ she says.
He tries a bigger laugh. It actually twists his tonsils. This one sounds even worse. He stops laughing and looks at his feet.
‘The girls tell me you’re a gardener,’ she says.
A gardener. No one has ever called him that before. They have called him other things. Frog mouth, loony, weirdo, spaz; but never this. He feels a rush of pleasure but it might be a mistake to do the laugh again so he attempts instead to appear casual. He tries digging his hands in his trouser pockets in an easy-going sort of manner only his apron is in the way and his hands get stuck.
She says, ‘Someone gave me a bonsai tree once. Biggest mistake of my life, accepting that gift. And the thing is, I really wanted to look after it. I read the leaflet. I put it in the right spot by the window. I watered it with this thimble. I even bought a pair of mini clippers. And then, guess what? The fucker withered up and died on me. I came down one morning and it had dropped its piddly leaves all over the floor. It was actually hanging sideways.’ She gives an impression of a tiny dead tree. He wants to laugh.
‘Maybe you watered it too much?’
‘I cared for it too much. That was the problem.’
Jim is not quite sure what to do with her story about the bonsai tree. He nods, as if he is caught up with thinking about something else. He yanks his hands free of his pockets.
‘You have nice fingers,’ says Eileen. ‘Artist’s fingers. I guess that’s why you’re good at gardening.’ She glances back at the café, and he realizes she must be looking for an excuse to get away.
He would like to say something else. He would like to stay a little while longer with this woman who stands with her feet wide, whose hair is the colour of flame. But he has no idea how you do small talk. It’s easy, a nurse at Besley Hill told him once. You just say what’s on your mind. A compliment is always nice, she told him.
‘I l-l-like your sandwich,’ says Jim.
Eileen frowns. She looks at the sandwich and then she looks back at him.
Jim’s mouth is like sandpaper. Maybe the sandwich was not a good starting point. ‘I like the way you have set out the crisps,’ he says. ‘On the side.’
‘Oh,’ she says.
‘And the – and the – lettuce. I like the way you have cut the tomato like a s-s-star.’
Eileen nods as if she has not considered that before. ‘I’ll make you one, if you like.’
Jim replies that he would like that very much and watches her deliver the sandwich. She says something to the customer that makes him roar with laughter. Jim wonders what it might be. As she strides back to the kitchen, her orange hat jumps about in her hair and she lifts her hand to bat it in the way other people might swat a fly. He feels something inside, like a tiny light switch going on. He doesn’t want to think about the day nobody came to meet him any more.
Despite the fact he was cured again when he was twenty-one, and released again, Jim was back at Besley Hill within six months. In that time he had tried to get it right. He had tried to be like everyone else. He enrolled at night school to catch up on his education. He tried to make conversation with his landlady and the other men who rented bedsits. But he found it hard to concentrate. Since the second set of electric shock treatment, he seemed to forget things. Not just the facts he had learned that day, but the most basic things, like repeating his name, for instance, or the street where he was living. He failed to sign on one day because he couldn’t remember where to get off the bus. He tried to take a job on the rubbish trucks but the other men laughed when he kept arranging the bins in order of size. They called him queer when he said he had no girlfriend. They never hurt him, though, and by the time he lost the job, he felt he had begun to belong. Sometimes he watched the dustbin men from his bedsit window, carrying the bins on their backs, and he wondered if they were his team or a different one. In working with them, he had begun to understand a little more about what it was to be strong, and part of a group. It was like looking inside another person’s window and seeing life from a different perspective.
There was a downside. For months afterwards he could still smell the rubbish bins in his clothes. He took to visiting the laundrette every day. The woman behind the counter lit one cigarette after the other; she held the smouldering stub of one to the fresh tip of the next. After a while he couldn’t tell if it was the smoke in his clothes or the bins, but whatever it was, he had to keep going back to wash them because they were never fully clean. And eventually she said, ‘You’re funny in the head, you are.’ So he couldn’t go back there either.
It was wearing dirty laundry that upset him the most. Some days he couldn’t even get dressed. From here came thoughts he didn’t want. And when he tried to do other things to get rid of the thoughts, like saying no to them or going for a walk, the tenants began to notice and steer clear of him. Then, opening his door one day, he happened to call hello to the Baby Belling. It wasn’t even meaningful. It was simply to be kind because it occurred to him the miniature oven looked lonely. But he noticed something happened afterwards, or rather that nothing happened, not once all day. He had no bad thoughts. A little while later his landlady got wind of his spells at Besley Hill and the room was no longer available.
After several nights on the streets, Jim handed himself in to the police. He was a danger to other people, he said. And even though he knew he would never willingly hurt anyone, he began to shout and kick things, as if he might. They drove him straight to Besley Hill. They even put the sirens on, although by that point he wasn’t shouting or kicking. He was only sitting very still.
It wasn’t clinical depression as such that took him back the third time. It wasn’t schizophrenia or multiple personality disorder or psychosis or any of the other names people gav
e it. It was more like habit. It was easier to be his troubled self, he found, than to be the reformed one. And even though he had begun doing the rituals now, his return to Besley Hill was like putting on old clothes and finding people recognized him. It felt safe.
Someone is making a noise from the café kitchen, a woman. Someone else is trying to calm her, and this is a man. The door flies open and Eileen bursts through it with her flaming red hair wide on her head. There is no hint of her orange hat and she has her coat flung over her shoulder, like a thing she has killed. The door crashes back on itself and produces a yelp. When Mr Meade emerges seconds later he has his hand to his nose.
‘Mrs Hill!’ he shouts between his fingers. ‘Eileen!’ He darts after her as she marches past tables. Customers are beginning to put down their hot beverages.
‘It’s me or the fucking hat,’ says Eileen, over her shoulder.
Mr Meade shakes his head while still cupping it, as if he is afraid vigorous movement may cause his nose to fall off. Shoppers queuing for their Festive Snack Deal (one hot drink with free mince pie; flapjacks / muffins not included) stare with open mouths.
Eileen stops so suddenly that Mr Meade collides with a trolley of Christmas groceries. ‘Look at us,’ she says, addressing not only him but the whole room, the shoppers, the staff with their orange hats, even the plastic tables and chairs. ‘Look at our lives.’
