The Pre-War House and Other Stories

by Alison Moore

  By the time he comes out, she has put the bag down again. It is heavy and the strap – a detachable leather one – digs into her shoulder. Preparing to leave, she picks her bag up again. Stanley, still zipping his fly, goes to the bed and sits down. ‘I’ve been made redundant,’ he says. ‘I’m blowing my severance pay on two weeks in the Caribbean.’

  ‘I want to go downstairs,’ she says.

  ‘Do you find yourself,’ he asks, ‘at our age, seeking out the people you knew when you were younger?’ Looking down between his legs, he says, ‘Your bedspread’s the same as mine, Monica.’

  It occurs to her that she could just go, leaving him here. Taking one last look around the room, she says, ‘You can let yourself out.’

  ‘Don’t you want to know,’ says Stanley, as Monica is walking to the door, ‘what Michael and I talked about?’

  Monica pauses with her back to him, frozen like someone with a gun pointed at her, the sight trained on the back of her head. ‘Not especially,’ she says.

  ‘I told him how I know you,’ he says, ‘told him some stories about the good old days.’ He lies down, putting his head on Monica’s pillow, the soles of his shoes on the bedspread. He closes his eyes. ‘I didn’t mention Mr Porter senior.’

  ‘I’m going,’ she says.

  ‘I need to piss again,’ moans Stanley. ‘Or I feel like I do. I’ve got some kind of infection. I keep wanting to piss but nothing comes out. It just hurts.’ He scampers to the bathroom and as he shuts himself in he says, ‘I suppose we’ll see one another on the plane. We should meet up in Barbados, go for a drink, tell Michael some more of our stories.’

  Monica stands for a moment outside the closed door. Slowly, she slips the bag off her shoulder and unclips the wide leather strap. Quietly fastening one end around the bathroom door handle, she pulls the strap taut and loops it around the handle of an adjacent cupboard, wrapping it around both handles a couple more times before securing it, with difficulty because her hands are shaking.

  Picking up her bag again, she leaves the room, hanging the ‘do not disturb’ sign on the door handle. She looks at her watch. She should be on the plane by the time the maid discovers him.

  She has to stop herself hurrying down the stairs, rushing into the lobby. She finds Michael sitting in the lounge area, on the sofa where Stanley sat the night before.

  ‘We should get going,’ says Monica, ‘if we don’t want to miss the plane.’

  ‘The bus won’t be here yet,’ says Michael, but Monica is already heading for the exit. Michael follows her. They have just got outside when he says, ‘Oh, I left my book in the bathroom. Did you pick it up?’ When Monica hesitates, he says, ‘I’ll nip up and get it. I’ll get the key back from reception.’

  ‘I’ve got your book,’ says Monica, peering down the empty road. ‘It’s in my bag.’

  ‘I can read the last chapter on the plane,’ says Michael. ‘Oh, I met someone called Stanley. He said he was a friend of yours. You shared a house or something.’

  ‘Not really,’ she says.

  She keeps glancing at the hotel entrance, and Michael, noticing, eyeing her goosepimples, says, ‘Do you want to wait inside? Are you cold?’

  ‘No,’ she says, ‘I just want to get going.’

  ‘Me too,’ says Michael. ‘I want to be on the plane.’

  Monica says nothing. She looks up at the overcast sky.

  From her seat near the back of the bus, Monica watches the door, flinching at every thin body glimpsed through the window, every bald head ducking on entering.

  ‘Are you looking for your friend?’ asks Michael. ‘Is he supposed to be on this bus?’

  ‘He’s not really my friend,’ says Monica.

  Even when people stop boarding, the bus waits. Eventually, the engine is switched on. The bus idles, spewing fumes, before slowly pulling away from the kerb, and Monica relaxes into her seat.

  She pictures Stanley sitting in the bathroom, reading Michael’s blockbuster. She knows she has only delayed him, and that when he is found, he will just take another flight, but Barbados is big enough, although she will no doubt find herself looking over her shoulder, never feeling quite at ease, preferring to stay in the hotel. Their paths won’t cross on the return journey because Stanley will go home after two weeks but they are staying for three. And he doesn’t know where they live. With any luck, she will never see him again.

  They head for the airport, picking up speed.

  It is raining as they cross the tarmac. They hurry towards the plane, running for cover as if the raindrops were a hail of bullets.

  They climb the metal staircase. At the top, a stewardess greets them warmly without making eye contact. The cabin smells peachy. They have sprayed something, thinks Monica, to mask the smell of sick.

  They slip into their seats and fasten their seatbelts. Monica turns to the rain-spattered window, peering anxiously out. Michael says, ‘You’re like the man in The Twilight Zone who sees a gremlin on the wing of the plane. Are you worried?’

  Beta blockers, thinks Monica. She would like beta blockers to numb her to this, the awfulness of this flight.

  ‘I’ll be all right,’ she says, ‘once we’re in the air.’

  Passengers continue to board and she watches their unhurried search for their seats, their dithering over what to put in the lockers, the aisles clogging.

  Michael inspects the contents of the pocket on the back of the seat in front – laminated emergency instructions, cartoons of people dealing calmly with disaster, and an in-flight magazine through which he leafs, browsing photographs of other destinations they might have chosen.

  Monica watches another plane taxiing down the wet runway. The backs of her legs are itching against the seat fabric. She is hours away from her next tablet.

  Michael reaches for Monica’s bag and hunts through it. ‘Where’s my book?’ he says.

  Monica goes through the motions of looking through the bag herself. ‘I don’t think it’s here.’

  ‘You said you’d picked it up.’

  ‘I thought I did.’ She is still searching, although pointlessly, there being barely anything in the bag to hunt through. She doesn’t turn to look at him, knowing that if she does she will find him looking at her as if she is crazy. In the end, she shrugs and apologises. She takes out the magazine she has bought and yesterday’s bottle of water. As she unscrews the lid and lifts the bottle to her mouth, her hand is shaking.

  Michael sighs. ‘We should be going soon,’ he says. He looks at his watch. ‘We should have gone already.’ Monica opens her magazine to a centre spread of women with circles around the sweat patches under their arms.

  There is a disturbance towards the front of the plane and she looks up to see the faltering smile of the stewardess at the door, and Michael says, ‘Is that your friend?’

  Glory Hole

  In the small hours, Peter wakes. He listens, wondering if his wife is in her bed yet or if she is still downstairs. On other nights, he has heard her laughing and has thought to himself that she never laughed like that before her brother arrived; or he has heard the guitar music the brother plays with his long fingernails; or he has been woken by the sound of the brother pissing like a racehorse in the bathroom.

  The brother turned up with a guitar and an overnight bag more than a month ago. They used to have a spare room but Peter’s wife sleeps in there now so they put her brother in the lounge. It smells of him, of his unmade bed, his unwashed clothes.

  Every evening, after dinner in the kitchen, Peter excuses himself from the table, leaving the two of them talking. The brother does not speak English. Neither did Peter’s wife when he first met her, in the canteen of the local college where she was taking a beginners’ class. She was attractive, friendly, keen, but there were months of canteen coffee and dates before they went back to her flat. He remembers he
r bedroom, her overwhelming perfume, her straddling him, seeming huge above him in the dark room. He did not know where to put his hands and wondered afterwards whether he had touched her at all.

  Peter doesn’t understand a word they say, but if he asks his wife what they talk about she tells him.

  ‘You have holes in the walls of your public toilets.’

  ‘Holes?’

  ‘So that two people can have sex without seeing one another.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘A man can put himself through a hole and receive sex. But he doesn’t know who is on the other side. He hopes it is someone who will give him pleasure.’

  Peter is always the first to go to bed and the first to get up in the morning. He potters about in the kitchen for hours until the brother appears wearing his bed sheet like a toga, greeting Peter with a warm hand on the back of his neck, or on the curve where his neck meets his shoulder, squeezing slightly, and Peter feels those long fingernails digging into his skin.

  Peter is thinking of saying to his wife that maybe it’s time her brother was moving on.

  ‘You also have holes between the booths in your adult video stores.’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Yes, you do. If you want to do something to the other man, you put your finger through the hole.’

  ‘Your finger?’

  ‘That’s how you invite him to put himself through. If he does, you can do something to him.’

  Peter’s evening class was in creative writing, but he did not complete the course. His characters – who always seemed to be waiting for something, for a train, a phone call, a knock at the door, and to whom something was inevitably going to happen – made him anxious. He left these stories unfinished and hasn’t written since, although he has been thinking about trying again.

  Someone is coming up the stairs. Peter could just stay where he is, warm in his bed, but he is getting out, slowly crossing the room in the dark, hesitating for a moment before opening the door.

  Reaching the top of the stairs, turning to look when Peter’s bedroom door opens, is the brother. He is naked, scratching himself with those long fingernails which Peter feels on the back of his neck every morning, which he feels digging into his skin, even now.

  Nurture

  Every day, Mark swims a mile of front crawl. He swallows a lot of swimming pool water and gets out with chlorine in his gut, his bladder bursting. There used to be disinfectant to paddle through on the way to the changing room, but that has gone. He takes a hot shower before heading home.

  As a child, he took himself to the pool on Saturday mornings, leaving his mum and dad and sister on the sofa in front of the TV. By the time he got back, his dad was starting in the garden. Even now, the smell of chlorine brings to mind his dad standing in the middle of his imperfect lawn holding a spray gun full of weedkiller.

  Under the grass, there were dozens of bulbs, and every spring, the green shoots pushed through. Mark’s dad glared at the unwelcome buds which ravaged his lawn. They were pests, like the slugs which ruined the marigolds, and the maggots which bred in the vegetable patch. He kept on digging them out, and they kept on coming up. Mark’s mum said could he not just leave them be?

  The bulbs had been planted before they lived there. Mark’s mum and dad and sister had lived somewhere else before Mark was born. It seemed to Mark that they had been happier in this other place than they were now, and he wondered why they didn’t still live there, why they couldn’t go back; he would have liked to live there too.

  He begged his mum to take him there, to see this house in which he did not exist, where they lived their lives without him. In the end, she took him. They went on a bus whose windows looked as if they had not been washed or even rained on in weeks, and the world Mark saw through them seemed dirty.

  They got off at a bus shelter whose glass had been smashed. They walked the few metres to the mouth of a dingy alleyway where his mum stopped. ‘I don’t want to,’ she said, holding on to a street sign as if someone were going to make her. She stood, grim-faced, staring into the alleyway as if there were something dreadful down there, amid the stink of bins, even though Mark could see nothing but shadows.

  She turned away, returning them to the bus stop to wait for another grimy bus which would take them back to where they had got on.

  Walking home from their stop, it seemed like it might rain soon, and Mark’s mum hurried them along, looking anxiously at the sky, at the clouds’ swollen underbellies, not wanting to get caught in a downpour.

  ‘Don’t tell your dad we went there,’ she said, and Mark promised, even though he thought that surely they hadn’t been there after all.

  Sometimes his dad, objecting to Mark’s language or to a look, snatched him up by his collar, gathering shirt and skin and hair in his fist, and carried him out into the garden. Then Mark, feeling like an animal picked up and dropped by a tornado, was deposited into the flowerbed. He felt his dad’s big, warm hand on the back of his neck, pushing him down until the turned soil pressed against his mouth, getting in between his lips and into his nostrils. Grit crunched between his teeth. He tasted the dirt on his tongue, felt it in his throat, felt all the things which crawled in it crawling in him, crawling and shitting and breeding in him.

  They went on holiday one summer to a converted barn on a French farm. Mark found ants living under the porch and was playing with them when the farmer’s big boots stopped beside him. Mark looked up. The farmer, whose smell reminded Mark of the beer in which his dad drowned slugs, said something, but in French, and Mark did not understand. The farmer gestured: Come with me.

  Mark followed the farmer across the yard and into a corrugated-iron cow shed which smelt of metal and piss and warm animal breath. At the far end of the shed, they stopped and the farmer nodded towards a dim corner. Mark saw a dog in the damp and stinking straw, straining, its body trembling, a bitch with something between her legs, something slipping wetly out of her. He heard mewling.

  He showed his sister the puppies in the cow shed and the ants under the house. They gave the ants some sugar and watched them carry it away.

  One morning, when the others went out walking, Mark stayed behind in the house. It was a warm day. He had the back door wide open for the breeze and was getting himself a cold drink from the fridge when he heard whimpering behind him. Turning, he saw a dog in the doorway, one of the farm dogs standing just inside the kitchen, dripping blood. Mark narrowed his eyes. He shut the fridge and opened a drawer. Approaching the dog, he raised his arm and brought a wooden rolling pin down hard on the dog’s black nose. He banged it down again and then again until the dog finally dropped the savaged puppy from between its jaws. Mark released the rolling pin and crouched down, bending over the small, ruined body. He moved to touch it and the dog snapped its empty and blood-wet jaws around his hand, its teeth breaking the skin, sinking into the flesh.

  Mark did not hear himself shouting, but he supposed that he must have done, that between them they must have made enough noise to bring the farmer’s wife running.

  The farmer’s wife tied the dog up outside and inspected Mark’s wounds. She did not seem surprised by the sight of the puppy lying on the floor; she just seemed disappointed.

  She spoke to Mark in English and he asked her why the dog had done that to its puppy. ‘That’s not one of his,’ she said, and Mark thought about nature programmes he’d seen in which dominant lions kill the young which aren’t theirs.

  The farmer’s wife went for a first-aid kit and while she was gone Mark’s parents and sister returned from their walk. Mark met them in the hallway and told them what had happened.

  ‘Jesus,’ said his mum, seeing the blood leaking from him, dripping from his fingertips. ‘Get off the carpet.’ She steered him back into the kitchen. The puppy was still there but she did not look at it. Fetching a cloth from the sink, she returned to
the hallway and tried to clean the blood off the carpet but a stain remained. She moved the doormat to cover it, and meanwhile Mark’s dad was boiling water to pour under the porch.

  The dog bite healed, with Mark doing his best not to pick at the scabs. When they came away, they left behind patches of new pink skin which were not quite smooth to the touch.

  Mark’s voice deepened. Dark hairs sprouted on his weak chin. He grew tall, filling doorways, startling his mum on the landing.

  His teachers talked to him about his falling grades. He was warned about antisocial behaviour, and then suspended. Mark took his exams but was not encouraged to stay on for the sixth form.

  Abroad again that summer, they stayed in a hotel with a pool and sun loungers on which they lay in their swimwear, Mark dripping wet from the lengths he swam, his sister dozing in a bikini, his mum with a beach towel wrapped around her, her eyes closed although she was awake, swatting at invisible insects. His dad sat upright in a plastic chair, his eyes open. Mark’s mum suddenly said brightly, looking at her grown-up daughter and her school-leaver son, ‘I suppose this could be our last ever holiday together.’

  Mark got an interview for a job with the council and his mum ironed a shirt for him to wear. His dad, finding him waiting bare-chested in the living room doorway, said Mark ought to be ironing his own shirt, not standing there watching her do it.

  ‘Leave him be,’ said his mum. ‘It’s only a shirt.’

  ‘If you get this job,’ she said to Mark, finishing the shirt and holding it out to him, ‘you could get a place of your own.’

  When Mark returned from his interview, he found his mum still ironing. She ironed everything, even underwear and sheets. His dad was in his armchair, reading the paper. Mark, shrugging off his jacket as he came into the living room, said, ‘I got it.’