‘I was hoping you’d call,’ he said.
‘I always call at this time,’ I replied.
But he knew that. He was clockwork, a second hand keeping perfect pace. He was the brain behind the arms pulling the levers in the engine room at the heart of all chaos. Something was wrong.
‘I don’t want you to worry,’ he said.
I started worrying.
‘OK.’
‘Or to worry Lou.’
‘What is it, Dad?’
‘It’s Mal,’ he said. A release of air. ‘He’s fine.’
‘What then?’
‘He had a heart attack, a small one but a heart attack. They can’t move him, they’re treating him here.’
I sank. My back slid down the varnished wood by the window until my knees sidled close to my chest. My backside landed on the dog’s loose hair lining the floor. I was jammed between the wall and the floor.
‘There are wires and machines everywhere from the hospital. Your mum has gone crazy, obviously, but he’s fine. They’ve called it a warning shot. The first cannon-ball over the bows, if you like.’
I stayed silent.
‘It’s been in the newspapers.’
I could hear his huge, hard hands shaking. I could hear him wanting me to come home. I could feel the plug pulled from the bottom of the sea I was swimming in.
‘But he’s OK. He’s OK. I just wanted you to know that he’s OK before you read about it or heard somehow, from Lou’s dad, whatever.’
I asked him to describe to me what had happened and I built the film of the story for playback in my thoughts. I pictured it perfectly. Mum was making supper. Waffles with bacon and slippery handfuls of beans. Garlic bread slathered in mayonnaise to cool and intensify the taste. She was lining it up neatly on a tray in the trailer, pushing open the door with her rear. She walked past the tent and the memory of Lou, through the front door, kicking off her slippers so that they landed together like two kittens fighting over a milky teat. Through another door, past the dirty metal ladder that leads to the attic where Dad was making plans, failing and beginning all over again. She prodded open the door of the bedroom and Mal was there, a sheet tucked under the bureau of his gut. She rested the supper upon the side. He took a waffle dripping with the grease of its pork jacket and bit two-thirds of it away. Mulch mulch mulch, his jaw rotated, his tongue forcing the food against his teeth, eroding it until it slipped in a disgusting flume of pulp down his throat.
‘And so it’s just a normal evening,’ said Dad but I directed the scenes in my head and turned it into a picture sharp enough to shred my skin.
She was using the serrated edge of the stainless steel knife to force mouthfuls of food onto a fork for him. A lonely orange bean hung from his mouth, sliding down his chin the way the last dollop of toothpaste is forced out of the tube. And his eyes started to bulge. The veins in his neck rose. And he was gripping the tray with a force so immense the plastic cracked in his hands. His heart got faster and faster, the valves inside it clapping a computerised drum surge, dum dum dum dum dum, faster the blood pumped through his arteries so hard it scored the lining. It tried to squeeze more thick crimson through the tiny gap. Dum dum dum dum dum, faster, and she was panicking. There was a tray on the wall and mayonnaise on the curtains. A piece of garlic bread rolled to safety underneath the bed. She was screaming now, they both were, him clutching at her arm and it was wobbling and sweating and burning right up. She was crying and he couldn’t breathe, hyperventilating, and it hurt, it was fear, the blood not reaching the extremities of his fingers and toes, and they were curling up in rapturous knots, he clawed at the span of his chest, pulling the hairs out of it.
I moved the hot phone to my other ear.
‘But I want you to know he’s OK,’ said Dad.
‘I know,’ I said. ‘I know.’
70
In the extension at the back of Norma’s house the tin roof was rattling as the rain landed hard upon it like bucketfuls of pins. The sound was awesome, so loud that in the brief sojourns between downpours you could still hear it. I was late. I wasted half an hour standing outside sheltering with the dog under the lip of the porch, trying to falsify the face I had on, wondering whether to tell Lou. This happiness that was finally mine, which I was now so scared of losing.
I pulled back the bedding and clambered in for the first time. It smelled sweet, like lemon and lavender. The sheets were warm with her.
‘Did you get wet?’ she asked, half asleep.
She didn’t turn over but she wasn’t angry. I pulled in tight behind her, flexing my spine until we made the same shape, slotting together like a children’s toy. My hand rested on the outside of her thigh, my nose nuzzled in the crown of her hair.
‘A bit.’
‘You’re still wet, you idiot.’
‘I know.’
She shuffled her feet to try and warm them, hiding them between my calves when it didn’t work.
‘Norma has finished our portrait,’ she said. ‘You haven’t even noticed, have you?’
I sat up and turned, and above us on the wall was me and Lou in thick oils, solid blocks of colour. We were on the porch, her in a strappy, fluid gown shaped by the air, me topless, grey trousers and no shoes. I dangled a thin, pensive finger over the line where her hair skirted the back of her neck. In the bottom right-hand corner was Norma Bee’s name, signed in lipstick the violent red of a sting. It was fabulous, we both agreed.
I didn’t tell her about Mal. Instead, and for the first time, we made love, underneath the picture on the wall.
Afterwards, while she slept, I watched the dog frolic on the grass through the window. It rolled on its back. It twitched and jolted on the slimy surface, its little tongue hanging from the side of its mouth, its ears pricked. Its tail wagging like a windscreen wiper, kicking up moisture into the air, a trail behind a jet. I wanted to join it.
I decided then not to tell her about Mal at all. I stopped phoning home. The days got better still.
71
I looked at my reflection. My middle hung over my bottom. My navel frowned, a droopy eyelid in the face of my trunk. My rhythm, sleeping and eating, had been settled quickly by the completing of contentment’s triumvirate, love. Sleeping, eating, love. I was expanding, steel one year baked in the sunshine. I saw Lou, mirrored, sidling in behind me. She kissed me on the shoulder, licking a zigzag to the apex of my armpit, where the flesh had begun to overtake itself.
‘I’m getting fat,’ I said.
She petted her belly, its slight gorgeous bloom.
‘Me too.’
‘No, you’re not,’ I said, and I pecked her just above her left ear, where a faint silver emergency flare had been shot.
Norma Bee was up and out early, the shadow of her car still cast in taupe dust on the drive. I fetched my freshened apron from the muffin-topped laundry basket and struggled, fingering its strings behind my back. Lou tied it deftly, then perched my white mesh butcher’s hat on my head. Together, her writing, we made a list.
Rib-eye steak.
Lamb cutlets.
Kidney.
Sausage.
Rump, if there’s any.
Chops (big bag).
Lou xx.
I promised not to forget to bring it home again. Lou used the blunt end of the pen to open the envelopes with the bills inside them. We talked no more of what we’d mentioned, giggling and drunk, the night before. About the stars on strings hanging from the ceiling, or the cot, wooden and grand. Lou had beamed at the suggestion of stencils, wild animals, tigers and leopards de-fanged, I’d joked that I would paint on the ceiling. A fantasy inside our own.
I went to work, the list poked into my pocket. Lou, with the pen still in her hand, took a single slip of paper from the pile in the drawer on the desk. She chewed the lid, the impressions of her teeth highlighted when the saliva puddled in crescents, echoing the glow from the lamp. She thought of it all at once, smiled, and wrote ‘Dear Mal’.
It was done within ten minutes.
Lou took the letter to be sent from the office close to my shop, where the queue for Wednesday’s ‘Gut Busting Mid-Week Meat Deal’ snaked out and past the window. We had lunch together, tacos haloed with golden cheese, and she headed home to help Norma Bee prepare for dinner.
The booty sweated inside the bag as I walked it home, moistening the warm plastic. Norma Bee’s car, dirty and tired, slept deeply. Two cats reclined floppily beneath it, rolling as the shade trundled. I opened the door.
Lou was on the sofa, next to a man. His skin was a pallid ivory, badly strapped to his skeleton. His grey hair was lank and dangerous cabling, fringing the broken sockets of his eyes. I’d never met him properly.
‘This is my dad,’ Lou said.
I didn’t need it confirming that Norma Bee had collected him from the airport.
He pushed the lamb chop I’d grilled around his plate like a general in the war room shifting troops about a map of Europe, consigning them to their deaths.
Lou put him into our bed and found me outside, wet cigarette like a thermometer hanging loosely from my mouth. She told me what she’d gleaned from his sad whispers, what fool’s gold was panned. The division in her attention I could see in what colour was lost from her eyes. It made my being duller.
‘He caught her with the man from life drawing. Went round like he said he would, drop off some stuff. A gift – he’d ordered a set of pencils and they’d delivered two. They were sleeping under the sheets that keep the paint from marking the furniture.’
‘Poor bastard,’ I said.
Norma Bee’s floor creaked. The cats screeched, pleasure then agony.
I imagined his house, the wall of her portraits torn to shreds. The pieces of her body ripped into tiny pieces on the floor, his heaviest pictures among them. A murder victim drawn.
‘He needs me,’ Lou said.
‘I need you.’
I was thick and selfish but my momentum unstoppable.
‘I’m his family.’
‘I’m your family.’
‘You’d have me kick him out, would you?’
‘No, of course not.’
‘What then?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘He’s here for a week, that’s all. He arranged it with Norma as a surprise for me.’
Her dad’s dismantled robot parts lay strewn around our bedroom floor, the workshop of the only mechanic who could rebuild him.
Lou went to her dad. When I poked my head around the door, she’d fallen asleep in the wicker chair I’d put next to the bed, where I would balance her breakfast when I brought it. I imagined the sound of Mal’s snoring. Sounded like laughter from across the sea.
72
‘And that’s how some people are rewarded for a lifetime of being good,’ Norma Bee laughed. She always laughed. Even bad news had ticklish fingers.
‘Poor bastard,’ I said again.
In the kitchen pots boiled on every surface, squeaking urgent whistles, the control room on a warship. We talked and talked and talked. Jealousy and wanting always coupled so well.
‘What me and Brian had might not have been perfect, but we had love. There were people in this town used to say I was a bad lady, letting him get like that. I didn’t pay no heed to those people, though. Letting him get like what? Letting him get happy? Letting him get happier than them, that’s what those people didn’t like. Know what I figured?’
I had never really noticed before but Norma Bee spoke a lot in questions.
‘What did you figure?’ I said, piggybacking her tongue.
‘Only the people that care about you can make you happy. So it was my job.’
Norma Bee, big fat oracle.
I stirred whatever she pointed to, piled it onto plates whenever she instructed me.
‘That man in there,’ she nodded through the wall I built, ‘that’s how he’s been rewarded for his life of goodness. With two women who could never love him as much as he loved them. But at least they gave him the best thing he’s got, right?’
‘What?’ I said. ‘Dramatic weight loss?’
‘No, honey,’ said Norma Bee. ‘Lou. She’s the only one who cares about him, and as long as that remains the way it is, she’ll do everything . . . everything she can to make him happy. Altruism, honey. That’s what love is.’
I saw that she was counselling me, pulling into my vision something blatant I’d somehow stupidly missed.
‘You gotta realise, love is a long line. It’s all love but it has opposite ends. There’s the end that’s good. The one they write romantic songs about. That’s the end you wanna be at. And there’s the end that’s bad, because love can destroy you too. And that end of the line is where most people are at. Happy as Brian and I were, I was destroying him. I can see that now. Could I see that then, when I was feeding him the delicious things I made? No. Because he was smiling when I did it. It was still love.’
I crouched on the floor by the refrigerator. Its motor rumbled in my spleen.
‘And my mum and Mal?’ I asked.
‘Don’t it just make her happy?’
‘Yes,’ I said.
‘He’s smiling, ain’t he?’
‘Yes,’ I said.
‘Then it’s love. Doesn’t mean it won’t destroy them both.’
I could smell burning. Norma Bee spun a switch to chide the gas. I swallowed.
‘And Lou?’
‘Poor Lou,’ said Norma Bee, weaving two forks through a colourful salad. ‘She’s watched one man she loves destroy himself. She’s not gonna let another. He needs her.’
‘I need her too,’ I said.
Norma Bee struggled to her knees in front of me. Her jewellery was cold like the pavement on my cheek.
‘Then you’ll wait. You just gotta not get destroyed while you do.’
‘But I will be,’ I said.
When I raised my head again she was back at the stove.
‘I’ll look after you,’ she said. ‘Here, eat this.’
73
Lou’s dad stayed in bed through the daytime, rarely rising in the evenings but for food. A fierce depression had its jaws around him and was doing crocodile rolls around the murky river bed. He didn’t fight. It dampened the feelings he was capable of having, disconnected them from experience. That one great act of falling in love with Rebecca Mar had led him up too quickly from the depths. Now he had the bends, the bubble of oxygen in his brain a sadness. He had sunk back to the bottom, where the crocodiles had found him. Now he was never to ascend.
Lou was down there with him, trying in vain to lift her dad from the stuck mud of the floor.
She swung on the chair that was strung between two beams, the dog drawing lines with its nose on her thigh. The time was sorrow-scented, a dream you enjoy that collapses out of distance of your recall.
‘I need to make him better,’ she said.
She rubbed the flat of her palm on the back of my head. The hair bristled.
The dog pounced, landed on a fly and killed it. It licked the busted spindles of its legs from the wood.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I can’t just watch it happen again.’
I could feel the pull of Mal’s orbit, her dad the probe that travelled ahead to collect information before the long journey home.
‘Stay here in Akron with me,’ I said. ‘Your dad too. We can buy a bigger house. We can have children.’
‘Why would you?’ she said. ‘If growing old is this.’
Sounded like my brother.
‘You’ll stay?’ I asked.
74
I was an elevator with a snapped rope, plummeting down the deep shaft of a mine at incredible speed, only stopping with a crash and crushing everything flat. Because she was gone. All that was left of her was the portrait. Lou, two-dimensional and ten inches high.
My feet squelched with the sweat that I dripped. My shirt a saturated second skin, a thin wet shell. My hair hung in sodden strips aro
und my countenance. I searched the store, aisle by aisle, through the frozen foods and shelves of cans. She wasn’t in the warm corner where the smell of fresh bread came over you like a homely malaise. The freshly made baguettes reached out from their baskets begging for coins, monkey’s arms at a hot zoo. She wasn’t standing by the chilly force-field of the fridges. This was where we’d linger on the days when the heat of the mid-afternoon sun stroked our skin with its steaming mitts. She wasn’t at the till chatting happily with the shop assistants, whiling away the hours of the day, recognising people from the bank. She was just gone.
I walked home past the butchery, raised a brief sad salute to the young man I’d trained to take over from me, a talented young guy who always remained clean, no matter what we cut, chopped or pulled apart. He’d rearranged the fixtures in the front and was stood, resplendent in his whites like Hollywood teeth. I knew he’d be good for the old place and thought of a happy Mrs GDF.
Norma Bee was standing on the porch in sweat-soaked luminous yellow Lycra. She was painting at her easel, the dog modelling for her in silly woollen booties she’d knitted.
It scattered from its basket as I stormed past, an angry black wind blowing ashore. Norma Bee leapt into the air and shrieked as I pushed her easel to the ground and the mutt-coloured paint disfigured the floor. With a donkey kick I knocked the screen door off its bottom hinge so that it hung there dead and awkward, and I ran through to the back of the house.
I was crying at the foot of the bed when Norma came in and bent around my shape.
‘Calm down,’ she said. ‘I’m gonna go fix you something to eat.’
‘Why did you take her to the airport?’ I said.
‘Honey, she asked me,’ Norma Bee said. ‘She knows her dad couldn’t stay here. She knows exactly what is right for him. She loves him.’
We had warm apple pie with lashings of cream in silence.
Bed Page 17
