by Morag Joss
“Isn’t it?”
“You know it isn’t. It’s practically another whole day just to get to you from Heathrow. Look, I am sorry, really I am. It would’ve been great to catch up with you guys. I worry about you, you know. I worry a lot. But I never promised, I couldn’t promise. Maybe later in the year, okay?”
“I hope so, dear. I do hope so. Maybe Christmas?”
“Yes! Yeah, Christmas might be very possible. I’ll try and swing it, I’ll really try. Mum, I’m truly sorry, okay? I’ll ring you tomorrow. Love to Dad. Take care now, okay? Talk soon. Bye!”
It was after nine o’clock by the time I was able to go back and clear the dishes. The third wine bottle was empty and the older man was slumped forward at the table, too drunk to care about pretending not to be. I think the younger man might have been crying; he turned his face away from me as I came in. The unfinished chicken lay on the plates cut open to the bone, the flesh pink and injured-looking. The bananas and custard were untouched on the sideboard. I didn’t offer them coffee or wish them goodnight. Back in the kitchen I gave Howard a slice of the pork and some roast potatoes, cut up so he could manage with a spoon, but he didn’t eat much. When I told him Adam wasn’t coming he behaved as if he hadn’t heard. I got him to bed without either of us speaking again, and went up to my own room.
ADAM’S BIRTHDAY 2004
On the morning of his twenty-first birthday Adam stayed in bed, intending to shorten the day by avoiding his parents for as long as possible but unsure if the effect wasn’t actually to lengthen it. For ages he’d lain wide awake but now was tired again. He yawned, pulling the cool of the room into his mouth and catching a web of mucus in his throat that made him cough in a way that reminded him of his father. His teeth were furry. It was after eleven o’clock and he hoped he’d lingered long enough to undo his mother’s hopes of a birthday breakfast; he didn’t do breakfast, at least not here and least of all the birthday kind. He remembered other birthday breakfasts, being expected to smile before he was properly awake, eating through gritted teeth the porridge made “special” in some awful way, mixed with nuts or rhubarb or something, and never being able to show he thought his presents “special” enough to see the worry clear from his mother’s face. Hardest of all was pretending not to notice how uncomfortable everyone was with the whole idea of “special.” He couldn’t face any of that today. He’d only been here two days and already he’d run out of energy for play-acting the prodigal son. But he ought to get up.
From downstairs he heard his mother treading through the hall from the kitchen, then a click as the front sitting room door opened. In a moment he would hear triple clunks as (one) she dropped the vacuum cleaner, (two) plugged it in, and (three) switched it on, followed by the rising drone as she went scraping along the carpet. In advance, his heart sank with the predictability of it, this series of familiar, comfortless sounds from childhood that meant B & B guests were booked in that night. The extra work for his mother always made Adam feel unreasonably guilty, as if the general atmosphere of reluctance that hung around the very idea of B & B guests came only from him. He yawned again. Just then his father’s voice rolled through the hall, calling out to her. Something about the pottery kiln, something not good judging by the peeved, high pitch of his voice. Probably another complaint about Digger, most likely over the logs for the firing he was supposed to be doing today. His mother’s answer sounded breathy and clipped as if she were talking to a child with the last remnant of her patience, and although the problems with the firing weren’t Adam’s fault either, her sad, even voice made him feel guiltier still. The vacuum cleaner started. Downstairs, the conversation seemed to be over. He ought to get up.
Instead he tried to turn his mind to Melanie and interest his penis in the attentions of his right hand, but the sounds that had intruded into the room intensified the idea of his parents, and threatened to bring an image of them—each alone, not together—almost before his eyes. He worked his hand harder. Then, as if from a distance, he saw a picture of himself—a young man sprawled on a heap of bedclothes with his eyes closed, trying to induce a forlorn, masturbatory oblivion that would postpone for a few moments longer the dismay of his twenty-first birthday. Instantly, he went limp. He rolled over and swore, hating the way he could ambush himself like this, by simply holding up an imaginary mirror that confronted him with his own lonely, overwhelmingly pathetic reflection. All at once he seemed even more lonely and pathetic than his parents, and his cock, flopping in his hand, even more lonely and pathetic than the rest of him. Melanie vanished from his thoughts, at least the carnal ones; they’d broken up weeks ago, anyway. She wasn’t really the point. If he was being honest, for the first two months they’d been together he’d been a bit bored except when he was in bed with her, and for the final two he’d been bored there as well. And guilty for the entire four, because she was a genuinely nice person and deserved better. Beyond the four months, he’d gone on feeling guilty because he’d been too busy working for his finals to miss her all that much, and by the time they were done with, too tired.
Now feeling self-conscious and a little disgusted, Adam withdrew his hand and cupped the back of his head on the flattened pillow. Could he go back to sleep? He closed his eyes and exhaled. But he heard the vacuum cleaner stop and the clump of his mother’s footsteps, and could not help seeing in his mind her leathery bare feet as she trudged in her clogs back to the kitchen and set about another of the jobs she would have liked him to be helping her with. He ought to get up.
As well as the clogs, she’d probably be wearing the same mottled brown skirt as yesterday. He hated the skirt, which she’d sewn from a bit of her home-woven fabric that she said was “naturally slubbed.” It looked like sackcloth dotted with rabbit droppings. The weave was so uneven and loose it bagged at the back where her buttocks strained and rubbed it to a brown sheen, and in front it made a sling for the crescent-shaped pillow of her stomach and dropped like a curtain over her knees. He wondered why he could imagine her in expensive, beautiful clothes when he’d never seen her in any, and why the thought made him feel like crying.
Now he could hear a van straining up the track, probably Digger’s pickup with the logs in the back. Adam yawned again. He should go and put in an appearance in the yard and back his father up when, as almost certainly it would, some spat started, about the price of the logs, the late delivery, whatever. Or he should go and feign some interest in the firing, at least; he hadn’t even asked Howard last night what he had ready for the kiln because the firings were so hit-and-miss it was better not to get any hopes up. Adam had heard enough about the fickle variables of clay and mineral quality and ambient temperature to last a lifetime, and as for his father’s experimental modifications to the loading, fueling, timing, and cooling of the kiln, never mind his specific errors—the blistered glazes, the vessels exploding because he’d trapped a bubble of air inside—well, it wasn’t unknown for those to cost him every single piece in the firing. Adam had found that the less he heard about the technicalities the easier it was to commiserate with genuine sympathy for all the wasted effort.
Now Digger’s dog started barking and Adam heard the rumble of the logs sliding from the pickup into the yard. The van coughed and revved, turned, and chugged back down the track. After that, silence. Adam knew that from his room at the front he would not hear the soft thuds as Howard lobbed logs into the wheelbarrow, nor the squeak of the wheel as he trundled it round to the outbuilding behind the studio that housed the kiln, nor the returning squeak, and more thuds. It took one person two hours to shift enough wood for a firing. Adam got up.
His parents came in and drank coffee while he opened his birthday present, a thick check shirt from the outdoor shop in Exeter where his mother bought him the clothes and boots that he only ever wore when he visited and that stayed in the house when he left. Didn’t she ever notice that his own clothes were completely different, that he was never going to feel comfortable in the things sh
e gave him to wear? No, she really didn’t, he thought, listening as she told him she’d spent forever choosing the color and was wondering if the dark green was right, she could change it if he wanted. She never did seem to realize the effect of what she was doing, that it so often produced the opposite outcome to the one she hoped for.
“No, I really like it,” he said. “Thank you very much.”
She smiled, and poured him more coffee. The trickle from the pot drew too much attention to the sudden silence among them.
“Oh, Adam, twenty-one!” she said wildly. “Where’s the time gone? Flown by! All grown up! I can’t believe it. Howard, can you believe it?” Howard, as if he’d been a bystander at the past twenty-one years, shook his head.
Adam could believe it, though. What he couldn’t believe was that his mother could come out with such remarks without irony or embarrassment. It would shock her to learn how very long in passing the twenty-one years seemed to him, how far away and aloof from his childhood he felt and had perhaps always wanted to feel. But then, pretty much everything shocked her, because she hadn’t a clue what was really going on half the time, not even in her own mind let alone anyone else’s. She had no idea, for example, that he hated the big fuss she made of his birthday, that he couldn’t stand the way she acted all incredulous and relieved as if it was a surprise to her that the date came around every year—what else did she expect? But she’d always been like that, taken aback by the obvious, never knowing with any conviction anything beyond the obvious. Never really thinking, because that way she could let the stupidest things go on appearing to be important. Birthday picnics, for example. It made him furious that she would go to all that trouble when, with or without B & B guests, she was always busy and mostly tired. No, that wasn’t the truth; what made him furious was that all the effort she made forced him to be spectacularly grateful, when all he wished for was that she would just stop making it. He couldn’t find it in himself to tell her that the birthday picnics were pointless, that even when he was little they hadn’t been that much fun. Instead, year after year, overwhelmed by the same paralyzing surge of tact, he went along with the fucking birthday picnic, furious that his gratitude made him complicit in the pretense that everything was lovely.
It wasn’t even that he wasn’t grateful, exactly. It just took it out of him, the strenuous show of appreciation for the dredged-up “favorite” picnic recipes, the clumsy baking, the finger-crossing for a fine day; it all brought a lump to his throat. But he could never withhold his gratitude. She would be hurt. Another thing for which Adam had always felt unreasonably and painfully accountable was how easily she was hurt.
At least this year the picnic would be short, because the firing that should have got under way first thing still hadn’t been started. With a bit of luck (or mismanagement on Howard’s part) there might not be enough time at all. That would be easiest, really. He couldn’t quite picture himself giving them the news he had to give them up there on the windy moor; the kitchen with the flat ticking clock was a more amenable setting for difficult news and of course would allow him a quicker getaway than the desolate trudge back down from the picnic. He watched his mother clear away the paper she’d wrapped the shirt in, folding it to keep, and bit his lip to prevent any observation about another of her futile little economies. He merely vowed privately, sucking in his breath, that never, ever, no matter how poor he might be, would he recycle a bit of wrapping paper.
Adam heaved himself from his chair, carried their coffee cups to the sink, and made for the door to the hall.
“You will wear it today, won’t you?” his mother said. “I’m dying to see it on.”
Adam returned and picked up the shirt. “ ’Course. I’ll put it on later. Don’t want to get it dirty helping with the logs, do I?”
She didn’t reply. Both his parents had weird and awkward smiles on their faces.
“What?” he said.
“Surprise!” his mother said. “Birthday surprise! Picnic surprise! Nobody’s doing logs. We’re going for a lovely early walk up on the moor and the birthday picnic!”
Jesus Christ, he thought, does she think I’m ten years old? “Mum, really, as far as I’m concerned the birthday’s no big deal, honest,” he said. “I mean, it’s great of you to do it and everything but there’s lots to get on with here, isn’t there? Dad’s doing a firing. We can leave off the picnic, can’t we? I don’t need a picnic. I’m twenty-one, not twelve.”
“But that’s why,” she said. “Twenty-one! Of course we’re having a birthday picnic! Oh Adam, your face! Howard, tell him!”
Howard ran his fingers through his majestic hair. “I’m not doing a firing. There isn’t enough stuff ready to fill the kiln,” he said. His voice was heavy with resignation at his lack of productivity. “I’m not in the studio so much these days.” He lifted his eyes and stared nobly out of the window. Jesus Christ, Adam thought. He’s actually proud of how little he does, he wants me to applaud it. How does he do it? How does he turn making nothing into something more significant than making a lot?
He asked, “Really? So if you’re not in the studio, what are you doing? You can’t be hoeing lettuces the whole time.”
Howard removed a beard hair from his mouth. “Your mother wanted you to think I was doing a firing so the picnic would be more of a surprise,” he said. “Even though there’s always a picnic on your birthday.”
“I wanted it to be a special surprise!” Deborah said, laughing.
“Oh Mum,” Adam said, smiling as hard as he could manage. To his father he said, “So, no firing.”
“Well, indeed, no. A firing’s a firing. And a picnic’s a picnic,” Howard said slowly and expectantly, as if some point to the words might occur to someone once he’d spoken them aloud.
“And the sheep are the sheep, remember,” his wife said, sighing and rising from the table. “They need checking. You didn’t go up yesterday.”
“They’re fine now they’re sheared. I’ll check them today. You still haven’t washed the fleeces.”
“Well, anyway,” Deborah said, “thank goodness Digger’s brought some logs up at last, in case you do do a firing.”
“I’m not in a position to do a firing.”
“But if you were, now you can.”
“I don’t know I can, even if I did do one. No two firings are the same. And I’m not doing one, so either way it’s the same, there’s no difference. Any more than you haven’t washed the fleeces yet.”
“What’s no difference? The same as what? You just said no two were the same.”
“That’s not what I mean. It was you that brought up the fleeces. Anyway, of course they’re never the same.”
All this was conducted in a placid, secure shared rhythm, as together Deborah and Howard washed and dried the coffee cups. Adam gazed from one parent to the other and wondered how long it had been since either of them had spoken more than a couple of words to anyone but the other. He began to wonder if they were going mad. Certainly they were becoming the kind of people who use words without meaning anything by them at all, people whose conversation, to the ears of any sane person, was a doomed verbal chase down a rabbit hole after sense and understanding.
Later, walking up the track behind his mother, Adam tried to collect the words he would need to tell her he was leaving that night. He knew from the way she was walking, in slow easy strides, her head tipping now and then upward to the sky, that she was for the moment happy; he yearned to keep her so and at the same time wished that her happiness had nothing to do with him. His bag was packed and waiting in his bedroom, his clapped-out old Nissan was in the yard. Let his father, lagging some way behind, take care of her happiness.
Each of them walked alone and spaced out from the others. After an hour or so they’d gone as far up the moor as they usually went, to the old stand of trees under the ridge. Deborah threw down the rug on a patch of grass and Adam kicked away a few thistles and the scattering of rabbit and sheep droppin
gs nearby. Over the ridge and away to the left, their sheep grazed the edge of the damp wooded combe that ran downward, slicing deep into the hill. The afternoon had clouded over and the trees sprouting in the crack of the gulley were almost black in the shadows.
The wind was too brisk for wasps or mosquitoes but also too brisk to sit in comfortably for long. It was also, to Adam’s relief, too windy to light the birthday cake candles, though his mother went through a whole box of matches in the attempt. Eventually she handed out slices of cake with her large cold hands and they ate fast, with a pretense of appetite. Deborah had brought ice cream but didn’t have any herself, and Adam discreetly tipped most of his into the ground. Howard fed his into his mouth without a glimmer of pleasure. His silence had deepened into a sulk; it occurred to Adam that his father never did enjoy anything that was somebody else’s idea. Within twenty minutes the picnic was over. Adam, in a show of tired contentment, leaned back and closed his eyes, wondering how soon he could decently begin his leave-taking speech. Howard murmured something about checking the sheep and wandered off. A few moments later when Deborah let out a long, stagy sigh and said wasn’t it all lovely, Adam pretended to be asleep.
Another picture of Melanie flashed into his mind, and for a moment he imagined bringing her up here and fucking her on the picnic rug. It was the sort of thing that would make her laugh. Maybe he’d text her later. Maybe if they got together again he’d be able to like her properly—after all, she was great, really. Thinking about it, fucking anybody up here on the rug would be pretty good, wouldn’t it? But the idea would not take hold, or rather everything about the idea except the actual fucking depressed him. The rug depressed him, the surrounding thistles and animal turds depressed him. Being up on the moor depressed him. It bored him. He sat up and looked around. He hated the whole place. His mother was sitting on a rock with her eyes closed, clasping her bent knees and smiling up at the sky. Her lower legs were veined and hairy. The brown skirt had ridden up and Adam could see the backs of her thighs, somehow vulnerable for all that they were so big. Didn’t she know she was revealing all that flesh, or did she know and not care? How did she manage to make such a thing of sitting and saying nothing, being so carefully quiet as if she were a child and still making up her mind how to behave?
