The Pre-War House and Other Stories

by Alison Moore

  Sometimes I went up to the attic room to look through the telescope. I went on my own, without asking, and sat on the bench at the open window, squeezing one eye shut and looking through the eyepiece with the other. The images were blurred, distorted by thermals, seen through a heat haze. I wasn’t even sure what I was looking at, these distant objects brought astonishingly close to my wide-open eye. I tried not to move or change anything, to stay still, just looking through the eyepiece; I tried to be careful.

  But one time, perhaps a leg on the tripod was not fully out, or perhaps my foot moved, but as I sat there in the dark, with my eye pressed to the lens, trying to see the far-away craters of the moon, the telescope toppled, falling away from me, and when it hit the wooden floor there was a sound like something breaking inside. I sat in the dark with screwworms in my heart and flies hatching in my stomach.

  I put the telescope up on its feet again and crept away, leaving the telescope broken in the darkness. I didn’t tell anyone what had happened; I never told anyone it was me. When the telescope was found to be damaged, my father didn’t get it mended – or perhaps he tried and found it couldn’t be fixed.

  In the attic, in my grandmother’s old room, the windows are closed. I can’t hear the outside world; I can’t hear the traffic or the people going by or the neighbours’ children playing in the snow.

  There is a pillow on my grandmother’s stripped-bare bed, and some half-finished knitting on her night-stand, something blue. I can smell her, on the pillow, in the air, in the dust.

  The telescope is gone, but the bench is still there at the window. I sit down and look out at the bright day, at the distant sky, and the tree-tops agitated by the soundless wind. I can’t see the moon but it is there, lurking quietly in the daylight.

  In the silence, I feel the squirming and fidgeting under my skin, in my belly.

  My father worked in an office, inputting medical data and producing charts tracing the spread and control of disease. He liked the precision of statistics, the clean lines of his graphs, the capturing of epidemics and pandemics in two-tone bar charts. He worked beneath shelves full of files, shelves bowed beneath the weight of his archived records.

  At home, too, he monitored activity, keeping all kinds of diaries, notebooks in which he wrote regularly. He liked to sit in the quiet corners of that quiet house, bent over his work, filling his notebooks with his small, tight writing.

  He had one for the garden, in which he made notes about the various weeds and pests he endeavoured to control, about the Spanish bluebell which ruined his lawn (‘naturally more invasive,’ he noted, ‘than the English bluebell; when cross-pollination takes place, the resulting seed is genetically corrupt’), the blackspot which attacked his roses (‘fungal infestation of the leaves, spreading to the stems and buds; no cure for the infected parts – remove and destroy’), the vine weevil which spoiled the leaves on his strawberries (‘adult vine weevils are female and lay hundreds of eggs in the summer; eggs are brown and diameter is less than 1mm – very difficult to find in the soil’), and the sap-sucking aphid (‘overwintering eggs are laid in crevices, and hatch in the spring’).

  He had one in which he documented the things he had seen through his father’s telescope, looking through the attic window with my sister. While Susan was looking at the moon and the stars, looking for comets and meteors, my father was looking for UFOs, looking for flying saucers and aliens, recording anomalies in his notebook, his diary of evidence.

  He had a notebook in which he monitored the activities of neighbours who encroached on his territory, whose ivy grew up the walls of his house, clamping sticky feet to his fresh paintwork and climbing up to and under his eaves; whose trees bent over the fence and dropped windfall apples on his path; whose hedges grew too high and blocked the light; whose cats crept into his vegetable patch and left their mess behind, and dug at the soil around his border plants and around the barberry bush; whose children kicked their balls onto his lawn and then came over the fence and through the hedge to fetch them back, and who put eggs through his letterbox so that they broke on his doormat, the viscous innards seeping between the fibres.

  And he had one, said my mother, in which he wrote stories. He had never told her this – he kept his jottings to himself – but she had looked, and there, in one of my father’s notebooks, she found stories, and in all of my father’s stories, she found herself – a character who looked just the way she did, dressed the way she did, spoke the way she did; a character whose blonde hair had darkened, whose grey was coming through; a character who was wearing my mother’s blue jumper and the skirt with a tear which she never got round to mending; a character who was saying something my mother had said over breakfast, something banal about the eggs. My mother was furious to find herself there, to find this woman wearing her clothes and copying the things she said and her mannerisms. And in some of the stories, this woman had a daughter who was small and fair and clever, and who adored her father.

  I have never kept a diary. I remember what has happened and who did what.

  There are too many quiet corners in this quiet house for me. I work with the radio on, switching between stations and turning up the volume, opening windows and chasing the silence out of the emptying rooms.

  In the bathroom, there is mildew in the grout between the shower tiles, and there are spiders making webs behind the toilet. I put vinegar on the mildew, but leave the spiders alone.

  In some ways, I am my father’s daughter, and in some ways I am not.

  My mother had a friend who had a motorbike. He came by in the middle of the day, when my father was at work. You could hear the bike coming down the road, slowing outside our house, and turning in. It was noisy and smelly and the oil tank leaked.

  He parked his bike in our driveway, where our father’s car belonged. He took off his helmet and ran his black-leather-gloved hand through his oil-black hair. He walked, with his long-legged stride and his heavy-booted step, up to our house, to our back door, and my mother let him in.

  We took our shoes off in the house, but my mother’s friend didn’t; he walked his dirty boots across my father’s scrubbed-clean floor, and sat down at the table. My sister and I, drawn to the kitchen by the sound of the motorbike, hung around, watching him. My mother made coffee, and Susan and I were allowed to stay and have some. When my sister spooned sugar into her cup, our mother’s friend said, ‘You don’t need sugar, you’re sweet enough already,’ and my sister giggled. She thought he was good-looking, although, she said, his eyes were weird, and his eyebrows met in the middle. And then he said the same thing to my mother – ‘You don’t need sugar,’ he said, ‘you’re sweet enough already’ – and she laughed too. I didn’t like the taste of coffee, I just pretended to drink it so that I could stay, and I didn’t take any sugar, and he didn’t say it to me.

  After a while, when my sister had finished her coffee and I had barely touched mine – just putting my lips to the rim of the cup, taking just enough to put a nasty taste in my mouth – our mother sent us outside to play. I followed Susan to the driveway, where she sat on the motorbike, first on her own and pretending to ride it, pretending to be him, and then behind me, with her arms around me, pretending to be his pillion passenger, pretending to be his girlfriend.

  I liked riding the bike with my sister, but I didn’t like him. I didn’t like him coming to our house when my father was out. I didn’t like his filthy bike standing in our driveway. I didn’t like him sitting in our kitchen, making our mother laugh.

  We watched them through the vinegar-clean kitchen window. We saw his hand, olive-skinned and oil-stained, touching our mother’s leg underneath the table, and stroking her cheek as he stood to go.

  He left dark stains on the driveway, and on our mother’s pink face, and on her white jeans. She stood at the kitchen sink, scrubbing washing-up liquid into the dirty mark on her thigh.

  We didn
’t know his name, or what he was to our mother, but we knew she’d met him a long time ago, before we were born, before she met our father. And we knew not to tell our father that he visited.

  Our mother washed her face and her trousers, and our father tried to clean up the puddle of oil he found on the driveway, but it wouldn’t quite go. He stood over it, troubled by the residue, the remaining stain.

  I hear a motorbike. It’s a sound which even now makes me go to the window. I half expect my sister to come running, to see the bike parked in the driveway, to sit on its still-warm seat. I feel her arms around me, holding on.

  These motorbikes race by. When I look, it has already gone.

  I sit at the kitchen table, sucking at the faded gilt rim of the china cup, drinking sugary tea – I am not yet sweet enough.

  We ate in the kitchen, all together at a little Formica-topped table. I sat between my mother, with her perfect complexion and her clean, white jeans and her laundry smell, and my father, who ate slowly and carefully, leaving the skins of anything which had grown in the ground, next to the dirt and the worms. My sister sat next to our grandmother, whose jaw clicked when she ate. It was cramped around that small table, and all our elbows knocked together if we stuck them out too far.

  When nobody said anything, we could just hear ourselves eating, our cutlery against our plates, and my grandmother’s jaw clicking. Sometimes my mother looked like she was going to speak, but then just raised her eyebrows instead. Sometimes my father said something like, ‘A very nice piece of meat, Barbara.’ And sometimes my grandmother said something like, ‘Barbara’s friend was here again today.’

  My mother’s knife squealed against her china plate.

  ‘Barbara’s friend?’ said my father.

  ‘Her friend with the motorbike,’ said my grandmother.

  My sister and I looked at one another, our cutlery frozen in midair, the click of our grandmother’s jaw counting out the seconds like a metronome.

  My father continued eating for a moment, picking away at the inside of his jacket potato, leaving its dirty skin. And then he put down his cutlery and looked at my mother, on whose clean, pink cheek I could almost see that black, oily fingerprint. He put his knife and fork together on his plate, stood up, pushed his chair under the table, and left the room.

  We sat there for a while, the four of us. Only my grandmother was still eating. My mother sat opposite her, with her elbows on the table and her hands clasped together like somebody praying – Dear God and In the name of Jesus Christ – with her eyebrows raised at my grandmother, who was concentrating on her dinner, finishing off the nice piece of meat.

  My mother pushed her chair back and left the kitchen. Following our father into the living room, she found him writing in one of his notebooks. Their voices carried through that quiet house, into the echoey kitchen. He said, ‘I thought we agreed . . . ’ and, ‘You did promise me, Barbara . . . ’ And she told him what she thought about his weird little stories, which, yes, she had read; she told him what she thought about his weird little notebook wife and his weird little notebook daughter who lived in his weird little notebook world; and my father gathered up his violated notebooks, his spoiled stories, and went upstairs.

  Our mother returned to the kitchen and cleared our father’s place, scraping the scraps he had left into the bin, while we ate the cold remains of our dinner.

  In the kitchen, sitting alone at the table, finishing my tea, I think I hear that metronomic clicking of my grandmother’s jaw, but it is just the clock ticking in a box in the hallway.

  That year, my sister suddenly grew in all directions. She grew tall, taller than me and nearly as tall as our father. Breasts swelled beneath her T-shirt; blocked pores swelled beneath her skin. She was blossoming, said our mother. Our father looked at her disapprovingly, as if she were something overgrown in his carefully tended garden, a corner found going wild; as if she were something overripe in his vegetable plot, with a distasteful maturing pungency which got right up his nose.

  She became mouthy and surly, arguing with him and not laughing at his jokes. She skipped meals and slammed doors, played loud music and smelt of cigarettes. She went out with boys, or brought them home. Our father would have said no, no boys, but our mother said of course there would be boys; his little girl was growing up, she said, and there would be boys.

  There was no star-gazing now, through a broken telescope. My father viewed her from a distance, narrowing his eyes as if she were something unknown. He would have liked to glue her like the coming-away wallpaper, to fix her like the mind-of-its-own clock.

  I don’t know which was worse for him, to think that she was out there, after dark, with these boys – these boys whose bodies were pulsing with adolescent hormones, testosterone stimulating their glands, their skin erupting, their voices breaking, deepening; these boys with one-track minds and wandering hands – or to know that these boys were in his house, their enormous shoes in his hallway.

  Susan and I shared a bedroom. When she had friends round, I sat in the living room with my father and my grandmother, doing homework or reading in dimming light or beneath the fringed and floral standard lamp, listening to the clicking of my grandmother’s knitting needles, and, through the ceiling, the bass beat, the heartbeat thump, of Susan’s music, and the deeper tones of a boy’s voice. My mother did not sit with us. She moved about the house, singing to herself, or she went out. My father sat in his armchair, waiting for bedtime, trying not to think about the boys and their hormones and their wandering hands, waiting for his wife to come home.

  My mother often came home smelling of smoke. It clung to her coat and her clothes; it clung to her hair and her night-air-flushed skin and her breath. It followed her in through the kitchen door and crept through the house.

  I stand on the doorstep, letting in some fresh air. It is icy out. I can see my breath, like when we used to hold imaginary cigarettes between our fingers and pretend we were puffing out smoke, when we were little, when it was cold.

  I don’t smoke, but sometimes I like the smell of it, the smell of my sister’s skin, the smell of my mother coming home.

  Spring spoiled my father’s garden with beautiful weeds. The Spanish bluebells erupted from the earth, worming up into the light, a bank of them invading and desecrating his flawless lawn. Even as my mother admired them, my father pulled them up, though the fecund bulbs remained, deep down in the soil.

  Where the bluebells had been, there were holes and bare patches, and my father cut the grass brutally short, punishing his ravaged lawn.

  In his vegetable patch, he found his neat rows of seedlings turned over and broken beneath the weight of cat shit, turds planted and raked over as if they might bloom come summer. He found cabbage maggot pupae in the soil around his leaf vegetables, and moth larvae eggs between the leaves of his good lettuces, and he crushed them between his fingers to stop them hatching.

  He found oily fingerprints on the wallpaper, and tiny woodworm holes in the skirting boards, small piles of frass beneath them, and in one corner of the kitchen he found the little black droppings of a rodent. In the cupboard, there was a cereal packet with a hole in the side, cornflakes spilling out. He put these things in the bin: the insect shit and the rodent shit and the spoiled cereal packet at which sharp little teeth had gnawed, the tiny evidence of intrusion and contamination. The oily fingerprints remained, ingrained.

  He set a trap, an old-fashioned mouse-trap with a sprung metal jaw. At night, I heard the little scrabbling sounds of something ferreting about in the kitchen, and silence, such tiny silences, and I stiffened, imagining the baited jaw, waiting for the snap of the trap, the damage.

  In the morning, my father stood in the middle of the kitchen, beneath the strip light, holding the mouse, which he had found caught in his trap, lying bloody and broken and struggling on his kitchen floor, its smooth, pink tail writhing like a worm
.

  My grandmother sat at the table, eating her breakfast and eyeing the mouse. ‘That won’t be it,’ she said. ‘That won’t be all. There’ll be a nest somewhere.’ Once again, the trap was set, the sprung metal jaw baited, tense, and once again, I held my breath.

  My father took the mouse out to the dustbin, and stood there for a minute, with the chill of early spring, the chill of the outside world, on his skin and in his lungs and beneath his slippered feet, its brightness in his eyes. There was fresh oil on the driveway, new dark puddles next to the stains he had tried to scrub away.

  It is February now, and there are no doubt grubs in my father’s vegetable plot; the insects have no doubt been making themselves at home, the females laying their eggs in his soil, the maggots hatching and burrowing down and eating through the roots of the cabbages he planted in the autumn, the pupae overwintering underground, waiting to emerge as flies in the spring.

  One weekend in the middle of the summer, the motorbike appeared in our driveway again. It was a Saturday and my father was at home. He was in the back garden, mowing stripes into the lawn. I was at the front of the house, sitting on the well-scrubbed doorstep, swatting at the flies and looking at my mother’s friend sitting on his motorbike, the engine running.

  The front door opened. I fell inwards a little, and my mother came out. She had to step over me, her heeled sandals and her bare legs clearing me, her hand lightly touching my head, the hem of her skirt and her perfume breezing by. She cut across the corner of the front garden, her heels sinking into the grass, making holes in the lawn, and clicking down the driveway to the motorbike. She climbed up behind her friend and was whisked away, riding pillion without a helmet, her bare knees gripping his hips, the flimsy fabric of her skirt catching the wind they made, as my father appeared at the side of the house, holding nettles in his gloved hands.