by Alison Moore
When Eleanor leaves her sister’s house, it is dark, which is a relief. She must, she thinks, look frightful. But she has splashed her face with cold water and combed her hair. She has calmed down.
She walks home, goes into her kitchen and puts on the light.
She can at least talk about it with her sister, who understands, of course, because it is her big brother, too, who has gone missing.
It has happened before. He went missing during his first term at university, leaving without a word and returning with a tan the following summer. He ran away on his wedding day and didn’t come home for six months. But he always sends a postcard, a birthday card, a Christmas card. Not this time though; it’s been a year now.
His absence has stirred in their mother a memory of the men who, in her youth, went to France and Belgium and never came back. Their small town, over time, was stripped of men. A whole generation, just gone.
Eleanor looks at the mail, the junk, on her kitchen counter, and throws it away.
She is all right now, she thinks. She will go to bed.
It will strike her, when she is all tucked up, that she has not seen Roger, but she will not get out of bed to call him, to see how he is, to suggest lunch the following day. She will already have taken a sleeping pill, and anyway – she will glance at her digital alarm clock glowing red in the dark – it will be too late.
The Yacht Man
When the man arrives, Linda invites him inside. She shows him into the living room and offers him a seat on the sofa as she sits down, but he prefers to stand.
She says, ‘I need a door.’
She has looked in B&Q but wants something a bit different. His Yellow Pages advert stood out. She thought he would bring a catalogue from which she could choose the type of wood she wants, the type of handle. She has considered stained-glass panels. But he doesn’t have a catalogue for her to browse through. What he has in his hands, what he opens and places on the table between them, is a display book full of pictures of the astonishingly fine work he once did on a yacht. He shows her pages of gracefully curving and gleaming mahogany chests of drawers and cabinets. She admires his work and he is pleased.
She offers him a cup of tea but he wants water. Colin, keeping out of the way in the kitchen, fills a glass and the kettle.
The yacht man, turning the page, shows Linda various views of exquisite marquetry. She touches the pictures with her fingertips, as if she might be able to feel that smooth, exotic wood.
The sturdy, beech-effect table on which the book lies is not beautiful but it was the practical choice while the kids were young. They have grown up and gone now though. She recently brought down from the loft a lovely side table which she has put in the hallway.
She found it at a flea market. This was before Colin, when she was with Vincent. Her eye was drawn to some engagement and eternity rings, and a table with Queen Anne legs, and she said to Vincent, ‘What do you think?’ But when she looked around, he was elsewhere, looking at a diving helmet. She bought the table anyway. A few years later, she heard that Vincent was living on a marine research vessel in the middle of some ocean.
‘It’s all very nice,’ says Linda, ‘but I just need a door.’
‘I can do a door,’ he says, without looking up from his photographs. He seems disappointed.
He takes measurements in the hallway, but when he leaves he still hasn’t shown her a single front door.
After locking up behind him, Linda returns to the living room. She and Colin have supper in front of the television and go up to bed.
In the morning, she finds the yacht man’s water glass on the table in the hallway, and the mark it has left on the wood.
She won’t call him. She will look again in the Yellow Pages for someone who can make her an ordinary door, something solid, attractive enough, inexpensive. Perhaps she will go back to B&Q. In the meantime, and afterwards, she will – with partial success – try to remove that perfect white circle on the Queen Anne table where the yacht man placed his glass before he left.
The Machines
There is a factory behind Christine’s house going twenty-four hours a day. In the middle of the night, when she is awake in the otherwise silent house, she can hear the rhythmic clanking of the machines. At other times, she might think that she can’t hear them, but this is only because she is getting used to it. At the back of everything, the noise is still there; it is constant.
She worked in the factory when she was eighteen, in between school and university. There were three shifts a day, and it was not uncommon to work a double. All summer, she heard the machines in her sleep. She still dreams about the factory sometimes.
The machines were alarming – these rows of huge steel contraptions with parts banging up and down and other bits zipping left and right, this going underneath that, and that slamming down. Some sections of the production line were less clankingly noisy but perhaps all the more disquieting, components shooting smoothly down and then up again, leaving behind perfect holes. It was one of these machines which once took a woman’s fingers off. So you had to be careful.
Her dad used to work there as well, and when he retired he found the world too quiet and still. Her parents lived where they had always lived, some miles out of town, just where the farms started. Sometimes you could only hear birds, maybe something in the distance, the buzz of a lawnmower, the bleating of sheep. The sheep made a racket during lambing, and again when the lambs were taken away a few months later. Their bleating then was like the sounding of klaxons. Afterwards, there was hush.
Even the machines in the house, said her father to her mother without having to raise his voice above the sound of the vacuum cleaner, made very little noise. He helped with the housework, loading the dishwasher and the washing machine and setting both running at the same time, but still there was only a gentle background hum which did not even necessitate turning up Classic FM. When it was too quiet, he talked to himself, or to his mother, who was no longer alive. He rediscovered heavy metal, getting out all his old tapes, and he got into Robot Wars, which filled the silence.
He died while Christine was at university, knocked down by rush-hour traffic in the nearest town. She got the train home on a Sunday and her mother picked her up from the station. The town centre, as they drove through it, was deserted. Christine put the radio on.
She laid claim to her dad’s tapes. She found a Walkman and listened to her dad’s heavy metal in bed and on the train on the return journey.
After university, she moved back home and got a job in a call centre. She started dating someone who worked in the cubicle next to hers. They ate their lunch together and talked about going to China before everything changed, or getting a couple of round-the-world tickets and just taking off, escaping. Instead, they got married and got a mortgage on a small house on the outskirts of town.
The only grass near this house is at the cemetery. They have a concrete backyard, and empty pots in which Christine might grow tomatoes. The front door opens right onto the street. The traffic is nonstop during the day, dirtying the brickwork and the white plastic door and the front windows, which Christine has to keep closed so that the net curtains don’t get filthy. It is a far cry from the peace of her childhood home.
Christine had always been a good sleeper, but after she got pregnant she began to wake in the middle of the night for no apparent reason, or with cramps in her legs, or with hunger pangs, cravings, at three or four or five o’clock in the morning. She would have to get up and go down to the kitchen, through whose window she could see the factory which never slept. People had all sorts of advice for remedying the insomnia and the cramps – warm baths, milk with honey, yoga – but at the same time, people were inclined to say, ‘Get used to it. You’ll never again sleep the way you used to.’
Even so, when the baby was born, the sleep deprivation came as a shock. He wanted her bre
ast almost constantly and woke every two hours during the night until four or five in the morning when he was ready to get up. This was in the winter, when it was still dark, with hours of darkness to come. She tried taking him into her bed but he did not like it. She tried walking around with him, singing to him, rocking him, all of which he liked but he did not go back to sleep. So then she put a light on, made a cup of tea and half-listened to the World Service programmes which come on before the shipping forecast. But even after a cup of tea, and even with the radio on, her eyes kept closing. Reading to him, she would blink and slip into sleep, having micro-dreams between one sentence and the next.
In the spring, she found that she was waking to that beautiful blue the still-starry sky turns just before dawn. By the end of May and well into July, the sun had already risen when the baby got her up.
After feeding him, she began to take him out in the pram, wheeling him along the canal towpath until the sound of the factory’s midnight to eight am shift was almost too far away to hear. On the road, the first buses went past, empty. She did not go anywhere in particular – the park did not open until seven and none of the cafés opened before eight – but she enjoyed the walk and the fresh air.
When the summer came to an end, she was once again waking up in the dark. But she began to appreciate the fact that she had not missed the sunrise, and that she could feed the baby and then dawn would arrive and she still had time to walk somewhere and see the sun come up.
She had a few favourite places. Sometimes she went no further than the canal, stopping on the bridge – putting the brakes on the pram – and sitting on the wall to watch the dingy water’s transformation at sunrise. Sometimes she wheeled him up to the monument and sat on its steps. But this morning, she headed for the new supermarket. Overlooked on one side by old office blocks, the area itself was unattractive, but on a clear day there was a good view to the east.
The twenty-four-hour supermarket looked abandoned when she went in. There was no one on the tills. When she got further into the store, she saw a few people stacking the shelves. She found herself tailed by a security guard, who kept an eye on her the whole time she was in there. She picked up a pack of nappies and then went to the fridge and got herself a drink, an iced coffee to keep herself awake. The security guard watched her even while she was paying for her things at the self-service checkout. When she put the nappies under the pram she felt guilty, as if she were doing something wrong, stashing these goods and wheeling them out of his shop.
Back outside, she parked the pram beside a bench and sat down with her coffee. She could not hear the factories now. She wanted to listen to one of her dad’s old heavy metal compilations – she had the Walkman in her bag with a tape already inside it. Digging out the headphones and putting them on, she pressed ‘play’ and waited for the sun to rise.
She opens her eyes. There is no sound coming from her headphones. Lifting her chin from her chest, she looks at the Walkman and sees that the tape has played out. It was probably the music ending, the silence and then the Walkman switching itself off, which disturbed her.
She turns to look at the baby, looking at the place where the baby should be. There is nothing there but slabs. She turns to look at the other side of the bench even though she knows she did not put the pram there. She stands. Her bag drops quietly to the floor and the plug is pulled from the Walkman so that the headphones remain on her head but with nothing at the end of the dangling lead.
When the woman in the factory lost her fingers, somebody stopped the machines. The production line came to a halt but there was all this yelling which filled the silence, and there was a frenzy of activity, people all trying to do something which would help. Christine remembers someone bringing lumps of ice for the woman’s hand, for the woman’s fingers.
But more than the accident and all the hysteria which followed it, what she mostly remembers is how it was afterwards, when the woman had been taken away and all the shouting and screaming had stopped and everyone was beginning to go back to whatever they had been doing before.
Wink Wink
My father meets me off the train, takes my bag and guides me to the car.
‘How long have we got you for?’ he asks.
‘A couple of weeks,’ I say. ‘Then I have to get back.’
‘How’s everything?’ he asks. ‘How’s the new house?’
‘Oh fine,’ I say, ‘except for the window. We’ve boarded it up for now.’
‘The window?’ he says. ‘What happened?’
‘Oh,’ I say, ‘we just had a bit of trouble. Some lads on their way back from the pub broke a window. I told Mum on the phone last night – did she not tell you?’
Of course my mother has not told him. She even said, ‘I don’t think I’ll tell your father. It would upset him, to think of you having trouble like that.’
It is like they are playing a game, seeing how many secrets they can stack up against one another. They both do it: Don’t tell your father, it will only worry him. Your mother doesn’t need to know; it’s our little secret.
One Saturday afternoon when my mother was at work and my father was looking after me, he drove me to the cinema and bought me a ticket to see Grease, a film my mother did not want me to see. He gave me money for sweets, counting the coins into my hand, just as he used to give me a little bit extra when the fair was on, putting it into my pocket as I headed out of the back door. ‘Don’t tell your mother,’ he said, and went wink wink. After the film, he collected me from the foyer and we went home. He looked a bit guilty – worried, I assumed, that I would tell my mother about his treat, but I didn’t.
We pull into the driveway of my parents’ house. My mother is already in the doorway, waiting for us. I get out of the car and give her a hug and am surprised by her grey hairs and the smallness of her body in my arms.
‘Look,’ she says, ushering me into the house and pushing a carrier bag at me. ‘I got you something in the sales.’
I peer into the bag and see pink bulging up at me. I pull it out, a shocking pink dress which my mother takes and holds up against me and says, ‘There.’
She goes to hang it up in my room.
‘Will you wear it?’ asks my father, quietly in the hallway. ‘Just while you’re here?’
I pull a face.
‘I know,’ he says, laughing, ‘but do it for your mother.’
I accept my assignment.
He says, ‘Good chap,’ and goes wink wink.
I take my bag and go up to my room.
‘Maybe it’s a bit bright,’ says my mother, ‘but your father likes to see you in a dress.’
I remember her, brown-haired and not so little, stopping me on the landing and giving me a fiver for a few more rides at the fair. ‘Don’t tell your father,’ she said, wink wink, and I carried our little secret down to the kitchen and found my father waiting there with pound coins. Wink wink.
When I was little, my father let me creep downstairs after my mother had gone to sleep. I sat on his knee watching late-night telly and he whispered, ‘For God’s sake, don’t tell your mother.’ And on his club nights, when my father was out having a few drinks with his old workmates, my mother gave me sips of her gin and orange before bed, and said, ‘You don’t need to tell your father.’ Wink wink.
When I’ve been home for a few days, I am sitting up late in the lounge reading a magazine and eating toast. I hear my father returning home from the social club. His key slips into the lock without any fumbling, and he lets himself in with none of the usual noise and buffoonery made when drunk and trying to be quiet. He closes the front door gently behind him and I hear him taking off his coat and shoes. Then, following the lamplight and the sound of page-turning and toast-munching, he comes into the lounge, looking surprised and saying, ‘Oh!’ when he sees me sitting there.
‘Hi Dad,’ I say.
‘
I’ve just been at the club,’ he says, glancing down at himself.
‘I know,’ I say. ‘Are you stopping up? Do you want to watch something?’
‘No,’ he says, shaking his head and putting his hands in his pockets. He looks like a reluctant little boy. ‘No, I’m going to bed.’
But still he stands there until I say, ‘Night then.’
‘Night, love,’ he says, and he comes over to give me a goodnight kiss. He leans over and I wait for the smell of drink and cigarette smoke to hit me – the club has always made him reek of both – but he smells very nice. When he kisses me, he kisses a small furrow of query in my forehead. He says again, ‘Night, love,’ and as he turns to leave the room he smiles down at me and winks.
Over breakfast, we listen to the news on the radio. There is an item about a young man who made a lot of money for his company through illegal means, and at his trial it emerged that his company had been well aware of his activities but pretended not to know as he was making them so much money.
‘How ridiculous,’ says my mother. ‘Fancy letting someone get up to no good right under your nose and not saying a word.’
I whack my spoon down on the shell of my boiled egg and set about peeling it off.
‘I’m going through to watch Country File,’ my mother says, taking her cup of tea with her.
I eat my egg, watching my father, who rubs his nose and reads his paper. Then I get up and follow my mother through to the lounge where I find her in front of the drinks cabinet adding a nip of gin to her tea.
‘Just a dash,’ she says gaily when she sees me out of the corner of her eye. She tests her tea and closes the cabinet. ‘Don’t tell your father.’ Wink wink. She switches the telly on and stares sadly at John Craven. ‘He’s a lovely man,’ she says.
