‘Where?’ he says.
‘Where what?’
I know how he hates it when I understand what he means but implore him for a clearer definition anyway, hates the effort, hates the energy he must summon to expand his diaphragm, lift his rib cage and make words.
‘Where are you going?’
To see Lou, I think.
‘Out. After your interview, I’m going out,’ I say.
He curls up the chubby elbow of his nose and purses his lips. His shiny, sweaty forehead ruffles in frustration.
‘With your legs?’ he says.
‘Yes, with my legs. I can’t go out without them.’
I look round at the walls and the floor and think about how long I’ve been here. I look at the display on the wall, the bright green liquid crystal shining down, illuminating Mal’s cavernous navel (by now stretched to the proportions of a medium-sized oven dish). I look at the huge, tattered pile of news cuttings forming a paper staircase up the wall. I look at my tiny bed wedged into the far corner. I hear Dad through the ceiling, hammering, clink clink, dragging a weighty new contraption across the floor he drilled holes in. The dusty leaves of wallpaper dying and dropping off, the autumn of the decoration. The sacks and sacks of mail from all over the world. The adult nappies. The dirty, dirty plates.
I pull on my other shoe, neatly weaving the laces like spaghetti through the holes in the leather. But I am early, very early. So I sit back on my bed and I watch mum help Mal suck dry spoonful after spoonful. A glinting chain of saliva sends a tractor beam between his gums and the silver. His swallow expels a bass heavy grunt, like an elderly cow hitting the floor, in anticipation of rain one last time.
38
Houses have, in the memories of the bricks, an ability to return to normal. To withstand death and loss. To return to a shape like a spring or a sponge. An innate power to survive even the greatest erosion. That’s what our house had, and when Mal, its beating heart and vibrant mind, had departed, it didn’t keel over and die as it would have seemed fit to. Instead it regenerated, the way the human body can its liver.
Mal visited, as he promised, which would always cast the spell of a toothy grin across Mum’s face. They would sit and talk for hours, her checking he was OK, him keeping her updated on developments.
‘I’ve got a job in an office,’ he said. ‘It’s boring but I just keep my head down and promotions happen pretty fast.’
A smart haircut had crept up behind him and fixed itself to his head. On a few occasions I’d pass him on my way to work, me on my bike, him in Lou’s car. A tie wound round his bulging neck, the top button forcing his Adam’s apple further up his throat like a corset might a plump bosom.
He looked like a black and white edition of Mal, an official version. Government sanctioned. One hundred per cent approved. On the ladder. Moving up. Ticking the boxes. Nine to five. Friday lunchtime drinking. Pay slip, mathematics. Bills first, play later. Die now, pay later. Coming home, feeling tired, plan the dinner for next week, go to bed. Wait for the weekend, DIY superstore, clean the house, dread the feeling, Monday morning alarm clock blaring. Big shop, big shop. Try and save up if you can. Summer holiday or broken boiler.
But Lou. He had Lou. Slowly she began to visit again, with Mal, each occasion doing a little more to melt the frost that had collected on the moment. Mum did her best to pretend that it had never been a problem, that she’d always been perfectly happy for Mal to leave. She wandered through her days, seemingly untouched by the news, untroubled by whatever went on around her. Serving up huge, elaborate dinners for me and Dad, happy to see us eat them but all of the time becoming more and more insular as the world she’d created slowly left her behind.
Dad, quieter and quieter still, would spend longer and longer periods away from home working. On his return he’d be up in his attic, building and making but quiet all the same.
The glue where Mal had been had dried and flaked, disintegrated.
It felt as though I was the only one participating in family life. Still living in the house, fearful to leave Mum on her own, I began to build myself my own little part of adulthood. The more Sal Bay came to stay, which she never did for the night but rather when Mum was out working late, the less I’d imagine that she was Lou as we lay together on the bed. No longer awkwardly but lovingly, tenderly. Normally.
In return for helping him continue to build the business on behalf of our arthritic boss, Red Ted gave me the absolute minimum amount of grief and let me work whatever hours I felt suited me. Occasionally, say after a hard day’s pulling the muscles from the legs of turkeys, talons still attached, in preparation for the Christmas rush, we’d head into town and get drunk together. Sometimes Mal would come along too. Life trundled along with a steady momentum. And though I thought about Lou, I was happy. Just as I knew in my heart and my bones and the fibres of my being as a child when Mal was about to turn an ordinary day into an extraordinary one, I knew it would happen again. And it would shake this steady ship, this steady boring ship, until we all fell off it. This sailor’s life was not the life for us. I wasn’t sure if I cared whether I’d drown. Maybe I already was. Just bobbing, waiting for the lifeboats to be deployed by whatever Mal did next. I knew that if that if this was how I felt conformity’s dull itch, in Mal it was an agony he couldn’t let persist. We were just waiting for the need to scratch it to become too big to take.
I was happy to wait, in the meat and the boredom and the wanting Lou. The heaviest photograph had not yet been taken.
39
One day I was tapping my fingers on the radiator like a tin-ribbed xylophone. Its cold metal vibrated, left hanging robotic melodies in the air. Mum was cleaning, rarely rising from the mists of sprayed polish and only to wonder aloud about the whereabouts of Dad, who had only gone to Ellis’s store and should have been home by now with more dusters. The one in her hand splayed wet and limp and matted with swathes of black muck and hair. She barely applied pressure to it, just swept it back and forth along the mantelpiece.
I watched the particles of spray that kicked up into the air have tiny dogfights so intently that when the phone rang it was a firecracker. I answered it.
‘Get your shoes on,’ said Mal. ‘We’re going on holiday.’
Then he hung up and all I could hear was the telephonic purr of a conversation ended, and all I could feel was a rush.
Lou’s old blue car sidled up to the kerb, contoured with great silver scratches that ran in zigzags as though they’d been put there by the thin-tipped sword of a flamboyant matador. Mal was in the passenger seat, his tidy hair now a mess, baring his teeth like an excited chimpanzee. He was wearing Lou’s coat, a grand purple piece of cloth with three chunks of golden buttons at the top. I wished I could hide notes in her pockets. I climbed into the back seat, stuffing my bag into the well by my feet. Lou grinned and kissed me on the cheek. Her hand rested on Mal’s thigh and when he spoke she squeezed it.
‘Where are we going?’ I asked.
‘To the sea,’ he said.
The old car hacked, reluctantly pulling into the road with a spectral smoke path behind it. We drove past Dad at the end of the road. We pressed the horn and waved. I banged on the windows until the glass shook and the rubber around it loosened. But he didn’t notice. His chin almost touching the steering wheel. His thoughts not of the road.
‘Go on then,’ I said to Mal as we gathered speed. ‘What’s going on?’
I could feel all the bumps and jolts of the drive compounded in my buttocks, the springs stacked loose in the seat jabbing pins into the meat of my calf.
‘I’ve been sat in an office answering a telephone all week. A twat selling shit he knows nothing about to idiots who have no idea. Lou’s been counting other people’s money behind the counter in a bank and you’ve no doubt been fingering your way through the insides of a cow.’ Lou grinned. ‘I’m not going to spend the two days off I have a week looking forward to the five that follow, am I? So I thought we’
d just get out of it for a while. Be somewhere new. See what we can find. See what there is to discover,’ Mal said.
‘Get drunk on the beach?’ Lou said.
‘Yes. For a start.’
Through the windscreen the sun cooked the soft hairs on our arms. She kept her hand tight on his thigh. He stroked the back of her neck. Even on the motorway and during the high-speed entrances and exits, the noise and the zipping-by.
When we arrived we parked by the ramp that the lifeboats use to enter the water. A large man and his friend were trying to sell cheap watches from the boot of their car, saw us get out and called Lou over. She went, not through intrigue but through politeness, and surveyed the range of tat he had displayed on a small rug. There were dank silvers and golds, like a collection of foils, worthless and gaudy. I followed her; a sensitive barometer for the out-of-place urged me to.
‘Any one you like, love?’ he said. His head was misshapen by bulging veins. All about him but his thin pink lips seemed brutish.
‘No, thank you,’ Lou said.
He held her arm just above her wrist. I was rooted.
‘Come on,’ he said, ‘I’ll give you girlfriend prices.’
His friend behind mooched. He laughed on cues but didn’t realise it, and behind his eyes he was replete. My fingers fidgeted in my hands. I looked to Mal but he’d gone to find a machine to buy a parking ticket from. I looked to Lou and he was still holding her arm. Not how Mal held it. She was brittle with fright, like he might snap her, and her eyes widened to invite me in but I was powerless and it was all so fast.
‘No. Thank you,’ she said.
She pulled her arm towards herself and stared. And he did the same but so much more powerfully. Because he thought he was a man, and because he thought that those not in his image were not. I was not in his image. I would never be in his image. My anger clogged my throat.
‘Come on,’ he said.
His face was up next to hers, his head square, blocky, twice the size of Lou’s. I saw his breath hitting her skin, refracting the day’s heat. I saw the missiles of spittle launched from his mouth, landing on her eyelids clenched shut, tight like bulldog clips.
‘At least give me a smile, beautiful.’
I burned a fury to see her wronged. A fog had befallen me and it was thick. I heard his friend laugh again.
‘Or a kiss.’
He closed his eyes too, and pursed his lips, and I wound up a coil of all the force I could muster, clasped my fingers together and pulled back my arm, ready to unload it.
Then Mal, Lou’s purple coat hung like a cape from his neck, his hair a blackened unruly weave, his shoes odd, stepped out smoothly from the afternoon as though he’d been there all along, part of the car or just of the day. He lifted one leg behind him until he was shaped like a bow, leaned in and kissed this thug full on the mouth in a short, quick burst. And he was the man, he with the least concern for any notion of how he as a man should behave. Before either of them, their heads like knuckles, could do anything about it, Mal grabbed the lip of the rug from the boot of the car and pulled it sharply. A hundred poorly made watches crashed into the cement and shattered in cheap shards.
Mal took Lou and we all ran together towards the beach. They gave chase but we lost them in their confusion. When we were far enough away, we stopped to quickly pull our shoes off and then carried on running, this time even faster, until they were gone. In safe distance, laughter having outfought the fear, Mal dropped the bag he’d been carrying on his shoulder and we sat to catch our breath, amazed and in love.
40
By the sea the breeze was a racket. It was already edging towards the remnants of the afternoon, and so the beach, or what little there was of it, was clearing of people. Those that remained watched as Mal made a great show of creating a sandy mosaic from the towels he’d brought with him. Me and Lou sat on the floor and laughed some more and were warmed by burying our feet.
We drank the wine Mal had hidden in the boot of the car as a surprise and rested until all of the sky was the colour and texture of clouds with nothing to break them into small floating pieces.
‘Do you like this?’ asked Mal.
Lou’s head was on his belly.
‘What?’ I said.
‘This, what we’re doing now. This middle part.’
‘Of course I like it . . . But the middle part of what?’
‘Of life,’ he said. ‘This is the bit after the time you can’t do anything for yourself and before the time you have to do anything for others.’
He stroked Lou’s head. She closed her eyes like she’d heard this before, or as though she were remembering an argument, words exchanged.
‘I love this bit,’ he said.
‘What makes you think you have to change?’ Lou said.
‘But you’re expected to,’ he replied, ‘and you will have to. Maybe one day you realise that everything you thought was coming to you, everything you’d been promised, just isn’t going to happen. And maybe when you realise that, maybe settling down is just what happens. Maybe that’s when you admit defeat. When you become a horrible, lecherous prick selling cheap jewellery out of your car in a car park. That’s when you know that it’s time to put your hands in the air. Give up. Move on. Life is over and it’s someone else’s turn.’
She was warm in his voice and his touch and the way he thought.
‘Right . . . I’m drinking sand here.’ Mal stood up and the final drips from his upturned glass parachuted to the ground. ‘I’m going to get more wine. And chocolate. Guard the towels.’
‘What kind of people would steal towels?’ shouted Lou, her voice snapping at his heels as he jogged down the beach.
‘Wet people,’ came the response after we could no longer make him out in the dark of the evening. And then there was silence for a second.
‘Lou,’ I whispered. ‘I’ve never been to the beach before.’
She sat up straight and incredulous.
‘Never?!’
‘Never. I nearly did once but Mal was naughty and we had to come home.’
She laughed. ‘Do you think he’s OK?’ she asked.
I stalled. ‘He’ll be fine. He’s only gone to get some more wine.’
‘No,’ she said. ‘Generally, do you think he’s OK?’
‘Of course. Why wouldn’t he be?’
‘He’s restless.’
‘He’s always restless.’
‘But in work, and at home. I don’t think he’s happy.’ ‘Don’t worry,’ I said. ‘Mal was always this way.’
I imagined her head on my stomach, me underneath her with my arms crossed behind my neck and the sky above us blackening until we fell asleep right there on the sand. And us going home together when we awoke. There was more quiet, and I watched on her face the inner whirrings of her decision-making process, whether or not she should tell me whatever it was that was opening and closing the gates of her thought. And then she opened her mouth to speak. I imagined a ping, the cartoon lightbulb of a new idea.
‘Last night,’ she said, a beat and then another, ‘I told him’, and another and another, ‘that I wanted to have a baby.’
I became massively aware of my own bodyweight, sinking.
‘Oh,’ I said.
‘He was just quiet. He didn’t really respond. He took all of his clothes off and he climbed into bed. I just presumed this was what would happen, that we would have a baby eventually. That’s just what you do, isn’t it? And when he woke up this morning he was different. Like when we were younger. He just insisted we do this. He didn’t even mention what I’d said last night. It was like he’d just reverted.’
The sea hissed. Foam fizzed on the beach.
‘Has he spoken to you about it?’
‘No.’ I shook my head. ‘He never really speaks to me.’
I lifted my feet so that the sand fell through the gaps between my toes in ticklish waterfalls. Lou quaffed the remainder of the wine from the plastic tumbler in h
er little hand.
41
When Mal arrived back with a plastic bag clanking with coloured glass tucked under his arm, I did my best to act like all me and Lou had spoken about was the lapping of the waves of the sea I’d never been in. The darkness landed like a pillow on our faces, and though we’d known it was coming we were surprised just how quickly it arrived.
‘You were gone for a while,’ Lou said.
‘I stopped off at the car,’ Mal said.
We sat and we drank, the conversation flitting happily through topics, a giddy moth between lamps. There was smiling and laughing until it came to three in the morning, when still it was not cold. The wind too was calm. We began to wane as sleep started to take us, and with a towel over her face to protect her eyes from the emulsion of the moonlight, Lou fell to slumber on the sand.
‘That’s it then,’ Mal said. I sensed he’d continue, I sensed he had something to say and that he would as soon as he had poured the last droplets of wine from the bottle into his cup. For the first time today he was not smiling. ‘Back to work.’
‘It’s not all that bad,’ I said.
‘But it’s not all that good either, is it?’ he said. ‘It’s not the stuff you read about in children’s books. You’re not the astronaut or the explorer. All this . . . bills, kids, marriage. It’s not good enough. What will there be to remember of a mediocre existence?’
I didn’t know I’d fallen asleep until the sun rose and poked its hot fingers through my eyelids, massaging my eyeballs until I was awake. Lou and Mal both sat there, stretching, emerging. Her hair was thick with sand. And still there was no one around. It was early. We filled our bags with towels and bottles and walked slowly, quietly, back to the car. I imagined we were returning to a military homecoming on a big ship in the sea. A million cheering people were lining the walls of the docks with flags and banners and kisses when we moored. I was still in this daydream as I climbed into the car and barely noticed the small crane that had been deployed to retrieve the watch thug’s vehicle, which rested in the shallow water at the bottom of the lifeboat ramp, all the ticking in the back of it having ceased.
Bed Page 9
