by Alison Moore
Teresa is standing near her now, standing over her, touching her shoulder and saying, ‘Janie, love, are you OK? People are talking about you.’ When she opens her eyes she sees that the person Teresa has come into the room with is one of the new employees, a young man. He is eating something meaty which smells bad and she begins to feel sick again.
Teresa says, ‘Are you poorly?’
The young man says, ‘The menopause made my mum feel tired, a bit sick.’
Janie closes her eyes again.
‘And moody,’ he says. ‘Crabby.’
After a while, they leave.
Alone again on the sagging sofa, listening to the hum of the fridge, she has just begun to doze when the shutting door startles her.
‘Janie,’ says Pete, ‘is everything all right? Teresa said it was the menopause.’
She has known Pete for years. He and Eric used to work together somewhere else. When they were both made redundant at the same time, Janie recommended them for positions here. Pete was hired but Eric was not.
Eric didn’t really bother after that. He neither worked nor signed on. The two of them lived on her salary, and he did nothing around the house either, although he offered her endless cups of tea as if that were enough, as if that were what she wanted from him. ‘If I wanted so much tea,’ she said, ‘I’d buy a frigging teasmade.’ He got used to sleeping late and then getting slowly and cheaply drunk in front of daytime TV. When, one evening, he suggested that her hormones might be making her irritable, she said to him, ‘It’s not my hormones running up the heating bill. It’s not my hormones stinking of cider.’ At first she told him not to drink so much, not to eat so much crap, to take some exercise. ‘You’ve already had one heart attack,’ she told him. ‘Are you after another?’ It is a long time now, though, since she reminded him to take care of himself.
She remembers waking in the morning, reaching for him before opening her eyes, to touch his warm body.
It is, she thinks, as if a stranger came home one day instead of her husband. He wore her husband’s clothes but they did not fit him and he sat on the sofa all day long with his trousers undone, and he showed little interest in sex. Their last quickie on the sofa, fuelled by cheap red wine, is more than a month old, more like two. She has become used to going to bed alone, her sleep disturbed only by the sound of the TV still on in the living room, the sound of his stumbling around or his snoring; and going to work while he is still in bed, and in the evening coming home and finding him on the sofa in front of the TV again, asking her about her day, asking her if she wants a cup of tea, touching her gently and saying, ‘Janie, love, is everything all right?’
‘Hey,’ says Pete, sitting down on the end of the sofa, lifting up her feet and laying them in his lap, ‘did you see on the telly last night about that thing that lives in snappers’ mouths? That’s a strange one.’
The TV was on when she got in from work. She put her briefcase down on the kitchen table, noticing the cocktail shaker and all the bottles which were out on the side. She went into the living room, where Eric was waiting with sunset-coloured cocktails. She took the glass he offered her – ‘An Alabama Slammer,’ he said – took a sip, ate the cherry, complimented him. Sitting down, she picked up the recipe book and leafed through it. When she finished her Alabama Slammer, she went to the kitchen and made them each a Cosmopolitan. When they’d drunk these, Eric manufactured a strong Daiquiri. She made a Gin Fizz and he made a Kamikaze. She made a Malibu Woo Woo and he made a Mojito, and at some point, perhaps after the Piña Colada, she started hurting him. Every time she opened her mouth, something horrible came out. When she went to bed, she left him in the living room surrounded by the debris of their cocktail evening.
‘Janie,’ says Pete, ‘I think you should go home.’
She nods.
‘Shall I make you a cup of tea?’ he asks, already on his way to the kitchen. Emptying the still-warm kettle into two mugs, he says, ‘Is Eric home? Why don’t you call him, ask him to come and get you.’ He puts the tea down on the coffee table and says, ‘I’ll call him for you.’ He speed-dials her home phone number on his mobile and passes it to her.
She listens to it ringing and then hears Eric’s voice saying, ‘We can’t come to the phone right now.’ Still she listens, and only when the recorded message ends and the answerphone beeps does she shake her head at Pete.
‘We’ll have our tea,’ says Pete, ‘and then I’m putting you in a taxi.’
She leaves her tea to go cold and refuses a taxi, but she does let Pete walk her to the bus stop. He waits with her until the bus comes and watches her get on, waving her off as if she were a brave little evacuee travelling alone for the first time in her life.
When the bus has gone three stops and is in the city centre, when she is still two miles from home, she gets off. She walks to a café she knows, somewhere she has been before with Eric.
She takes a bottle of water from the fridge, pays for it and chooses a seat by the window, looking out. It is quiet. She does not talk to anyone. There are newspapers on the tables but she does not read them. When the café begins to close, she leaves her untouched bottle of water and wanders slowly home.
Closing the front door behind her and hanging up her coat, she goes to the foot of the stairs. She does not turn to look through the living room doorway at the dirty glasses on the coffee table, at the empty sofa and the television’s black screen. She climbs the stairs and enters the bedroom.
It is dark, just as it was when she left it, the curtains closed. She can still see everything though. She gets into bed. When she is ready, she reaches out. She touches Eric, his bare skin, his body, which was already cold when she woke that morning.
She closes her eyes.
No one disturbs her attempt to sleep. No one comes in asking if she wants a cup of tea. No one touches her gently and says, ‘Janie, love, is everything all right?’
The Pre-War House
‘The past beats inside me like a second heart.’
JOHN BANVILLE, The Sea
In the front garden, in the narrow beds, the flowers which emerged in what felt like the first days of spring lie buried beneath the late snow, their opening buds like small mouths gaping in shock, their stems broken.
Inside, the rooms are full of cardboard boxes, into which the contents of the house have been packed. I open cupboards and wardrobes and drawers which I have already checked and know are empty, peering into and under the dark-wood furniture and the bare-mattressed beds, looking for the smallest thing which may have been left behind.
I remember the sounds of this house in which I grew up – the creaking of the doors and the floorboards and the stairs, the groaning of the pipes, the wheezing and sighing of the springs in the sofa cushions – the sounds of an old house aching. But mostly I remember the silence, the stillness.
Lifting the remaining pictures down from the walls, I am struck by the brightness of the squares of wallpaper behind them, the sharpness of the pattern, like pictures of the wallpaper as it used to be, framed by the wallpaper as it is now, which has faded over the years.
When the house is all packed up and everything is clean, I will sit at the kitchen table and eat the supper I brought from home, and mark a pile of essays on the Treaty of Versailles and the Weimar Republic and the ways in which the seeds of World War Two were sown in World War One. I have bedding to put on my old single bed in my old room, in which I will sleep tonight. My car is parked in the road, in front of the garden wall, by the icy kerb, to leave the driveway free for the van which will be here tomorrow.
In the morning, the men will come, and I will let them in. They will walk through this quiet house in their heavy boots, and they will take away all the boxes and the furniture, the contents of this old house, load it all up and take it away.
‘This house was brand new,’ said my grandmother, ‘when I was
a child, in the 1930s, before the war. The garden was nothing but mud from one end to the other. My father laid the brick path down to the end wall, marked out the vegetable patch, and grassed the rest of it over.’
Little about the house had been changed since then. We were sitting on the same pre-war three-piece suite, with pre-war family photographs arranged on the pre-war furniture and pre-war pictures hanging on the high walls. Pre-war curtains kept the sunlight off the pre-war wallpaper and the pre-war carpets, and a pre-war clock ticked in the hallway.
‘Over the road,’ she said, ‘it was all fields. They’ve spoilt it now, building those houses there.’ She gazed out of the window at the ruined landscape. ‘We knew the war was coming, and sure enough it came. I was just a girl, a little younger than you are now. One night, a bomb fell in the field opposite.’ She nodded towards the new houses. ‘It made a big hole in the ground, but it didn’t go off. I saw it, the unexploded enemy bomb lying at the bottom, smooth and round like an egg in a nest.’
I thought about the quiet tree roots and the blind earthworms, startled in the ground or torn in two, their raw ends squirming, and my grandmother looked up at the empty sky, as if she was worried that the bombs had not yet all fallen.
I imagined it still lying there, this unhatched egg buried in a hole in the ground, under the grass with the roots and the worms, under the houses, the new estate.
My father was born in the 1950s, long after the end of the war but not before the end of rationing; even in peacetime the meanness of the war lingered. He was raised by my grandmother in this pre-war house, and it was he, in my childhood, who re-glued the wallpaper when it peeled, who mended the clock when it failed.
The front of our house, like all the other houses in the street, was painted white. Every few years, my father put on his protective overalls and spent a week up a ladder, cleaning the brickwork and the window frames, bleaching mould and treating rot and filling cracks and sanding and sealing flaking and crumbling patches. And then he painted, from left to right, from top to bottom, from corner to corner, working the new paint across each brick and between the bricks and into the corners. Our house shone in the sunshine, like the twinkling tooth in a toothpaste advert.
He liked to clean. He started in his mother’s attic bedroom and cleaned all the way down to the kitchen, cleaning the windows with vinegar and newspaper, the dark wood with lemon oil, the oven with baking soda. He was like a flood washing through the house, down the stairs and out through the back door, all the dirt pouring down the drain. When he had finished, our pre-war house looked brand new.
His garden was immaculate. His lawn was like a bowling green; it looked like he trimmed it with nail scissors. Nothing wild grew there. He dealt with the seeds shat down by birds in flight, like bombs dropped by enemy planes, and the Spanish bluebells whose bulbs lay deep in the earth beneath his pristine lawn, whose shoots wormed their way towards the surface in the spring. He protected his vegetables from the cabbage maggots which wanted to burrow into the soft roots and spoil them, and from the moth larvae which wanted to lay their eggs between the young leaves of his lettuces.
Spring was a minefield; he preferred the winter, the frost, the freeze, the ice – the clean, white world.
He was not a handsome man, but he was always clean – ‘spick and span,’ said my grandmother – and he had strong bones, good bone structure. ‘I have good bones,’ he said, ‘and good teeth. I have good genes.’
Like my father, I love the winter, the whitewash of snow, the freezing of everything. In deep snow, there is no garden, now gone to seed; there is no grass, grown long and uneven and littered with autumn’s leaves; there are no beds, no border plants strangled by weeds; there is no driveway, no pavement, no road; there is just snow, in which the only footprints are my own.
The outside world seems remote, like a landscape photograph of the bare branches of cold trees against a blank, white sky, viewed through glass which I clean the way he did, with vinegar and newspaper.
I glue the pre-war paper where it is peeling from the walls, but I don’t know how to fix the hallway clock which is running slow. I lift it down from the wall, and it keeps on ticking, pulsing in my hands.
On the whole, the only new things which came into the house came with my mother when she married my father in 1977 and in her early twenties that wasn’t very much. She brought some mugs with jokes on, which were put to the back of the crockery cupboard, behind the family china, and nonetheless got broken over the years. She brought some family photographs, and displayed them on the sideboard alongside her in-laws, and my grandmother moved them to the back, these interlopers, who peeked cheerfully, colourfully, through the gaps. She brought her books, and put them in the bookcase in the living room, and my grandmother winced to see the random and vulgar paperbacks which had appeared on her shelves, which she found nestling between her hardback classics.
Before my mother married my father, she was a hostess on long-distance coaches. It wasn’t well paid or glamorous – she didn’t like the old-fashioned uniform or serving tea on bumpy, bendy roads – and she had never been abroad, but she got to travel up and down the country, going to cities and tourist attractions and the seaside.
My father, a passenger on a weekday coach to Bournemouth, on his way to a conference, had watched her walking up and down the aisle, with her slim figure buttoned smartly into her modest uniform, her good legs in polished heels, her long, fair hair neat, pinned up on top of her head. She had served him little disposable cups of warm tea, wobbling a little when the coach went round a roundabout, holding on, and the sunshine through the window had fallen on her face, lighting her clear skin and her blue eyes, and he had smiled, showing his good teeth.
My mother’s skin was as smooth and pale as the bluebell bulbs beneath my father’s lawn, as smooth and pale as the larvae in his vegetable patch.
She shaved her legs in the bath, removing the light brown stubble which sprouted from her follicles. She peered into the bathroom mirror, worrying over her complexion, looking for clogged pores and spots gathering beneath the surface, looking for the bad skin which had plagued her as a girl, looking for wrinkles and crow’s feet, applying concealer and foundation and powder. She had her hair cut short now; she had it done every week, and came home from the hair salon smelling like she had been laundered.
Outside, it was nearly the twenty-first century, but when she stepped through her front door, she said, she could have been my great-grandmother stepping into her hallway sixty years earlier. She closed the door and found herself standing in a pre-war house which was deathly quiet apart from the ticking of that interminable clock. She disliked that house, with its wallpaper which was older than she was, older than my grandmother. She disliked the ancient kitchen with its pre-war china, whose gilt rims were faded from having been sucked at by generations of mouths. She wanted new cupboards and a freezer and a microwave and a mixer tap. She disliked the stillness of the house, and the smell, the smell of vinegar and mothballs – like pickled onions, she said, and death.
She once brought a new vase into the house, something modern she liked. She put it on the mantelpiece in the living room, and my grandmother looked at it and said it didn’t go. It stayed there for a while though, even after my mother found it broken on the hearth and had to glue it.
Early in their marriage, before I was born, my mother took for herself a small patch of the garden, near the end wall, where she planted a barberry bush. She sat out there from time to time, in her little bit of my father’s garden, just looking at the flowers on the barberry bush, or closing her eyes in the sunshine, and my father hovered at a distance, agitated, taking it out on the weeds.
I have brought tea bags and milk and sugar, but not a mug. I unpack one of the newspaper-wrapped china cups from a cardboard box marked ‘kitchen’.
There was mould growing, spores breeding on the overripe fruit in the fri
dge and in the fruit bowl, clinging to the softening skins; breeding in the bread bin and in the dregs of tea at the bottom of an unwashed cup.
The fridge is empty now, apart from my carton of milk. The bread bin and the fruit bowl and the cups are packed away, apart from the one I am using. The kettle is still out on the worktop.
There is an old bar of tar soap by the sink. Its heavy smell is unpleasant, sickening.
I turn on the tap, and the house trembles.
My sister, said my grandmother, was our mother’s daughter. I had seen photographs of my mother at Susan’s age, and if it hadn’t been for the look of a 1960s photograph and the 1960s fashions I might not have been able to tell them apart. They had the same slight frame, the same small features, the same colouring, the same skin. They had the same tilt of the head and the same way of looking at you out of the same pair of pale blue eyes.
There was not so much of our mother in me. I was younger than my sister but bigger, and darker.
Susan had always been our father’s favourite. His eyes followed her around rooms. He liked to make her laugh, to hear the laugh which was just like our mother’s. And he liked to watch the night sky with her – on clear nights they went up to the attic room, sat in the dark on a bench at the window, and watched the skies through an old telescope. They sat side by side, my sister, looking at the moon and its craters, looking at the planets and the stars, looking for comets and meteors, and my father, scanning the vast, black night.
She was clever, and she knew what she wanted to do when she grew up: she wanted to study tropical diseases, parasites. She told me about worms which burrow through your eyeballs, or into your skin and lay their eggs in you, or which lay their eggs in your wounds and when the larvae hatch they tunnel into your skin to feed, and if they are disturbed they screw themselves in deeper. She told me about parasites which live in your stomach, and tiny, translucent fish in the Amazon which swim up inside you when you wee in the water, which slither up and put out their spines to anchor themselves, and start nibbling. I felt them crawling under my skin and in my stomach, felt them wriggling and chewing inside me, making me squirm.
