‘How long are you going to stay there?’ he asked.
‘I don’t know. Just a holiday but we’ll see. It’s nice here. Quiet. You’d like it, Dad, you know?’
‘I don’t know,’ he said, wistfully, ‘but I imagine you’re right.’
I detected the heartbreaking twang, how jealousy sounds in a father’s voice.
‘Well done, son,’ he said.
I said goodbye as the pips chimed my time to a close, and stood still there in that phone box like a Neanderthal suspended inside an ice cube.
‘What’s wrong?’ asked Lou as I climbed into the back of the car.
‘Nothing,’ I said.
Lou’s money, all that was left of her mother’s earthly residue, burned slowly here. We took Norma Bee to diners. In the evenings we drank her homemade wine and prepared vast meals together. And when we sat and spoke about Brian Bee, or about Malcolm Ede. I sensed that both Lou and Norma Bee had that same part of them that was lost. And most nights I reclined in a big wooden chair on the decking with the dog curled up in my lap. I listened to their therapeutic toing and froing, stroking the hound’s hairy head roughly how it liked it. As the pattern was sustained, the more comfortable we became.
I took a job in the local butcher’s. The owner was impressed by my knife work, how clean off the bone I could trim the cow. I told him about Red Ted a little but he never asked any questions. Instead he listened to the basketball on the radio, recounting from memory highlights in the commentary from his favourite-ever games. He called everyone by their initials. I was to call him GDF, just as everyone else did, and he told me that it stood for lots of different things. I never knew which were true.
One night we went to GDF’s house for dinner, so that I might meet his family.
‘You must be Mrs Ede?’ he said to Lou.
She tucked her hair behind her ear, ruffled the tip of her nose and laughed.
‘I must be,’ she said.
GDF slapped his thigh. His wife came into the room, oven gloves making warm pillows of her hands.
‘You must be Mrs GDF?’ I said.
She said that she was. Mrs GDF worked in the local bank. She and Lou talked while GDF and I watched basketball on the television. The following Monday, Lou started work. Norma Bee said that if we liked it so much, we could stay as long as we wanted to.
‘We don’t want to get in the way,’ I said.
‘I’ve worked around men much bigger than you,’ said Norma Bee, her giggle reaching every room of the house.
Weeks and months went by, each hour slower than the last but each passing anniversary coming with what felt like an ever-increasing frequency. Lou and I grew closer still, my heart fonder, contented the pair of us. Our moods and movements intertwined, and I stood a gardener watering a seed he planted long ago, watching it begin to emerge from the earth. We grew so close that Norma Bee asked us if she could paint our portrait together. We agreed, and night after night on the veranda she mapped us out on her easel, the birds fleeing from the trees around the garden every time she boomed her laugh into the black sky and it ricocheted off the moon. Lou said she thought of her dad’s drawings.
Norma Bee was at her easel, shading, shaping and colouring one morning, when, as I rose from my bed, she said in her delicious brogue, ‘Here, I made you breakfast.’
By the time Lou got to the table, she found I’d already poured her an orange juice with bits in, just how she liked it. She sat down next to me and I willed the memory of Mal to leak from her into the ground. We were lulled into a new inertia, comfortable and unmoving. I didn’t want to wake us in case when I did she couldn’t get back to sleep. I knew that I would easily.
66
Mal was turning forty, I remembered. Fifteen in-bed years. I bought him a birthday card with a monkey on it, hanging upside down in a bright cone hat. It was smoking a cigar, which it shouldn’t have, and its teeth were mauve. At supper I put it on the table with a pen, its nib an oily wedge. I wrote: ‘Happy birthday, Mal’. Norma drew two fleshy feet protruding from a bedstead and signed her name with a curve and a bounce. I walked the dog, and when I returned the envelope was sealed, the pen in its pot. Later I held it to the sun to try and read what Lou had written but the lines were sandwiched by the thick slates of card. I promised to post it the next day and considered steaming open the envelope. But I didn’t. We talked about home for the rest of the evening, and what little might have changed in the four years we’d been gone. They were as suspended in time as us.
‘How is your father, Lou?’ asked Norma Bee.
‘Happy,’ she said, happy too at the notion.
‘And your mum?’
‘My mum?’ I said, late to remember that Lou’s mum was dead, so little did we talk about her.
‘Yes. How is your mum?’
A wash of sorrow came upon me. I’d not thought of her as much as I should have done, not as much at all.
‘Fine,’ I said but with only half of my heart.
‘You think?’ said Lou.
From her tone I gained a temper, the itch before a swelling.
‘Yes.’
‘Stockholm Syndrome fine?’
The itch reddened and boiled.
‘What?’
‘Hostages are happy because they’ve got a roof over their head and dry clothes. Doesn’t mean they’re fine.’
‘You’re not really qualified to comment, Lou,’ I snapped.
Surprised, she flexed in her chair. I wanted to remedy this in an instant but a chant began internally that wouldn’t abate, and the blame I put at her feet for being free but still not being mine squatted hot and angry on my lips.
‘You didn’t leave. Not that easy, is it?’
‘But I did!’ she said, shrill and spiked. The scream of the firework.
‘Perhaps it isn’t a question of geography!’ The explosion in the air.
‘Guys!’ said Norma Bee, placation. The coos of the crowd at the flame in the sky.
Lou went quiet, her gaze intent on her knees. The relationship had always been fractious, Mum’s and hers. They’d no grasp of their commonalities, twins forever at arm’s length. They both loved him. So I tell Lou and Norma Bee about my mum.
My mum had lived in that bungalow her entire life, as had I until I was thirty-six. Her dad had walked out when she was young. I knew more of my grandma, frayed by senility. She was still alive when I could first form memories, just as hers began to dissipate. Her neural pathways were dug road.
Mum cared for her completely for what remained of her life. I remembered how she would kneel on the floor, Nan’s feet in her lap, bathing her brittle corns in soapy water. Watching the wax of her mother’s weakling candle flay to nothing. Her last words to Mum had been telling, the final hurrah of her mind. ‘You really have been lovely.’
‘She wants to care for people. I’m not sure she knows what else to do,’ I said.
Her and Lou didn’t know how similar they were.
Lou lifted her chair from the porch and set it next to mine. She kissed my ear.
‘Sorry,’ she said. ‘I hadn’t meant it like that.’
I twined my fingers in hers like the closing jaws of a Venus flytrap.
‘It’s OK,’ I replied.
Norma Bee watched the clouds circle. Vultures in the air.
Mum, Norma Bee and Lou were all the same to me. But one had a focus, one had lost hers and the last had yet to find it. Even though it was sat right next to her and she was squeezing its hand harder still. I knew she was thinking of him. Mal was still in between us, the space between magnets. But I had knocked them further apart.
67
Then a letter arrived, for Lou, its postmark stiff and British. Inside it was a sketch of a naked Rebecca Mar. She was holding a cape of emerald silk, a corner in each hand clasped to each shoulder. But for that, naked. Hammocks of intense shade cuffed her bosoms. Lighter greys fell in triangles on her belly, giving it that boxy shape of middle age, when the muscle
is reluctant to tighten. She was standing in the doorway of Lou’s dad’s kitchen, and behind her the flowers in the garden stretched to skim the wasps.
Dear Lou, it said on the reverse, the webbed black scrawl and expanding blots of a pen meant for calligraphy.
It’s your dad. Obviously. Hope you two are still doing well out there. I must come and visit. And say thank you to Norma for me for those recipes. Guess what! I sold a sketch that I did. Of Rebecca, naturally. Just a simple thing, a line drawing of her tending the garden. I did it about the same time I did the one I’ve sent you here but I can’t remember which was first. And not for much money either, just a few pounds. Another guy from life drawing asked to buy it, he said it might help him (he’s only just started) with perspective and things, and it’s not very often we get a new guy (he’s the first since I started), the rest are just old ladies. It was a bit embarrassing . . . he asked me to sign it! Couldn’t really say no, could I? He’s even paying Rebecca to do some private sitting for him. He must have too much money I reckon, but she doesn’t mind, money is money.
Been past Malcolm’s house a few times. Crazy. You know, your tent is still there.
I watched Lou read his name. She stopped on it but I couldn’t tell if was any more than she might at a full stop or a comma. Good.
Anyway, love, write back. Let me know when would be a good time to come, if Norma wouldn’t mind.
Love to you all,
Dad
‘He sounds well, doesn’t he?’ Lou said.
GDF died later that same week, suddenly, teaching a grandson how to play basketball on the driveway of his house. At his funeral, his wife asked me to take over the butchery. I said yes outright, then discussed it with Lou and Norma Bee later that night in a bar next to the bank. I didn’t tell them I’d already decided but they agreed I should do it. This had been home for a long time, our lives for longer still.
I called home monthly, sitting in the corner of Norma Bee’s lounge watching her and Lou from the window in the garden. And I felt sick before and during but reprieved when I replaced the handset in the firm grip of the receiver. Each evening afterwards I recapitulated for Lou. I made it sound as boring as possible, as staid and as plain as a lump of unbaked dough.
I didn’t mention his celebrity, that on his fortieth birthday there was a party for him outside our house attended by some people he didn’t even know. Day Five Thousand Four Hundred and Seventy-Five, according to the display on the wall. That he was well over sixty-five stone these days.
I sat on my bed, telling her simply that he was still in his. That Dad was still in the attic and that Mum was still Mum. I tried to make it about us.
‘Means I’ll be forty in two years,’ I said.
She laughed, realised I wasn’t too and apologised.
‘Yeah, but I’ve been thinking. There are things I want that I don’t have. And I think I’m old enough to have them.’
I itched at my chin. She softened.
‘Go on . . .’ she said.
Then Norma Bee called us outside.
We found her in the yard, standing inside a large barrel and crushing ripe purple grapes with her bare, stained feet. It was dusk. All the shades of the night were a powdery version of their selves by day. Norma went to her easel, its back to us until the end result. Lou stood at the table in a long white dress, cleaning wine glasses with a small yellow cloth. I pictured her sat with her legs wide open, running her fingers up and down the finely tuned strings of a majestic golden harp. I told Norma what I’d just told Lou of my unrest.
She was still teasing the canvas with the brush as she spoke. She drew a few deep breaths, storing energy like the dynamo on a bicycle. Then she began.
‘See, Brian, my husband, God rest his soul, he had no choice. He was not a well man. The two of us, we were big. I mean, look at me. I ain’t gonna win no beauty pageants. We ate well, every day, three times a day. I used to love feeding him, you see? I used to love doing things for him, all these little things, and soon I had no choice ’cos Brian couldn’t even move no more. He couldn’t go to work no more, he just got too big. He used to work as a security guard. Sure, he wasn’t the fastest security guard but he was a difficult man to get past all right. And then soon he was just too heavy. He couldn’t walk very far. He couldn’t even stand for very long without getting out of breath. And so they fired him, and he came home, and he lay on that big old bed of ours and he stayed there until the day I came through that door with his pancakes and his coffee for breakfast and I found him right where I left him, dead. That was the hand he was dealt by the Lord, and that’s fine because that was the hand I was dealt too. I was put on this earth to look after Brian. To feed him and take care of him. And he was put on this earth to have me do that for him. That was why we were meant to be together until the good Lord decided it was time to take Brian away. That was the way it was meant to be. He would eat the food I made him and I would paint his picture. That was how our little family worked.’
I looked at the table carpeted in food. Hotdogs and ribs. Potatoes and fried chicken. Legs, wings, breasts, sauces and carbonated drinks. But I had no appetite, my stomach felt distended and tight. And I looked through the window at the paintings of Brian that lined the wall. Each of them was exquisite. Pastel renderings of his legs, huge and segmented by fat like giant larvae. Watercolour impressions of his arms, thick as punchbags heavy with paté. Oil daubings of his gruesome bloated paunch, flanked either side by flattened, sagging breasts like the ears of an elderly elephant. I felt nauseous.
‘Lou,’ she said. Lou was standing, leant against the rim of the veranda, her arms bowed, made from incredible shapes. ‘You aren’t the same as us. You’re not me. You’re not Malcolm’s mother. What you’re doing isn’t caring any more, honey. What you’re doing, and you’ve been doing it for fifteen years, is grieving. The problem you have is that Malcolm Ede never died. He never let you give the love you had for him to someone else.’ Me, I thought, me. ‘What are you going to do, honey? Wait here for him to die?’
Lou was weeping, a whispering horn. I gripped the dark wood of my chair, forcing soft indentations. I beamed implorations into Norma Bee’s brain, telepathic puppeteer. Go on, I yearned, go on.
‘I don’t mean to upset you, Lou, sweetheart,’ she said, her grapey footprints padding across the floorboards, ‘but trust me when I say from experience that the things you want won’t be there when he’s gone. You need to realise that he already is.’
With that, Norma Bee walked back into the home she wished more than anything she could pass down to a daughter. I could have kissed her, kissed her rubbery lips.
Lou didn’t come to me, didn’t put her arms around me. There was no parting of the clouds, no tractor beam of sunshine falling on me.
So I said it, even though I didn’t mean it.
‘Lou.’ She looked at me, face striped and pink. ‘I can’t do this any more.’
I thought of Sally Bay, pretty Sally Bay, the only girlfriend I’d ever had. How I’d deserted her without a thought. And I trembled, deserting one who doesn’t even belong to me but to my brother, like she always had.
‘I’m leaving,’ I said, and I prayed it was enough.
I went to bed.
68
An hour in the morning, pre the slinking of the moon, and she was looking at me, differently though, different in the details so close-up of her face.
She leaned forward, her hand on mine on my knee, and with her lips just slightly apart, her hair tangled about her face and her eyes closed as if to sleep, she kissed me. It lingered a while. Numbed, I could not move.
I lay back down and absorbed the aftermath of an immense, exhausting high. I fell asleep almost immediately.
In the morning I was woken by the dog’s long nails clacking across the hallway. I realised only then that at some point in the night Lou had climbed into bed with me, this tiny single put-me-up, and was fast asleep with her arm around my waist and her face nuz
zled in the cradle of my shoulder. And now she was mine, and I worried about moving in case I stopped this lasting for ever.
I kissed her on the forehead, my magnificent beauty, and closed my eyes again, pretending to sleep until she opened hers and kissed me back.
In that little wooden house we didn’t talk about Mal again. We went about our lives as though he hadn’t existed as anything other than the bitter aftertaste of a drink wrongly ordered. In a conscious effort not to end up like poor old Brian Bee, me and Lou politely declined seconds, thirds and fourths most nights. When I wasn’t working, I put my mind and hands to work rebuilding the walls that Norma Bee had demolished when she moved into the trailer, and with a group of her neighbours even extended the back of her house into the yard. I took it upon myself to widen some of the smaller doorways as Norma widened herself. She remained a mother hen. Where my mum would have flapped like a scared, trapped chaffinch, Norma Bee would cluck and preen and warm her eggs.
I missed Mal and Mum and Dad but I would have swapped nothing for this. Lou. It was glorious. I could have basked in the heat of it for ever.
69
Walking into town, we enjoyed seeing the people. I liked it when they passed the church. They would sprinkle their face and shoulders with the angles of an imaginary cross. We stopped for milkshakes at a diner. There was plenty of space on the bench opposite but Lou always sat right next to me.
Once we’d finished, she blew bubbles with the straw in the marsh at the bottom of her glass while I paid at the counter. Then we parted at the exit, Lou to the bank and me to continue painting the walls of the extension where that morning for the first time we had made a proper bed together. It was deep and thick, with layer upon layer of heavily stuffed quilting. The pillows were plump like Brian’s feet. I walked home, my pocket rattling with change. I steeled myself to make the call home. It had been a month.
Dad answered. He wasn’t out of breath. He hadn’t been in the attic.
Bed Page 16
