The People at Number 9

by Felicity Everett

  “Sky?”

  “Mandy’s little girl. Anyway, sorry, good to get that off my chest.” She leaned forward and flicked her barely smoked cigarette out of the window. “Gorgeous day…”

  Sara glanced outside. It was lovely. The cherry blossom was in bloom; the chill had gone from the air.

  “Shall we start off with some mind-body stuff in the garden?”

  “Mind-body?” said Sara.

  “A bit of yoga. Great for focus. I could do a guided meditation. See where that takes us.”

  “How do you mean…?”

  “Creatively,” said Lou. “See what they feel like after that: painting, writing, music-making – whatever.”

  “Oh, okay, sounds good.”

  Sara had pencilled in a session on symmetry, using the handbag mirrors she had bought from The Pound Shop.

  “I really enjoyed the weekend,” Lou said, apropos of nothing.

  “Oh, me too,” Sara said, forcing a smile; digging deep for the residual affection. “Great atmosphere. We should definitely go again next year.”

  Lou nodded happily.

  “Your mum!” she said. “What a character.”

  “Yeah.”

  “No, I really liked her. She was great. And Richard,” added Lou. “You’re lucky, Sara, I envy you.”

  Sara stared in surprise, but before she could respond, Lou was on her feet.

  “Listen up, guys,” she called through the open window, “we’re going to do something fun now. Get yourselves into a space where you can spin round, arms outstretched, without touching anyone else.”

  The boys looked sceptical, but to Sara’s surprise, they lobbed the football into the shed and did as they were told. “Yep,” Lou called, authoritatively, “that’s it. Wider, wider… without touching anyone else, I said.”

  Considering the state of the house when he arrived home, Neil seemed pretty chirpy. He opened a beer, took a swig, and then started loading the dishwasher. Sara sat, slumped at the kitchen table, glass of wine in hand. She didn’t even have the energy to go through the motions.

  “Tough day?”

  She gave him a look.

  “You just need to get into a routine.”

  “Thanks.”

  He slammed the dishwasher closed with his knee and pressed start.

  “Shouldn’t this spare clay go away before it dries up?” Neil asked.

  “That’s not spare clay, that’s Ulrik the Slayer.”

  “Oka-a-y…”

  Neil manouevred the coarse clay figure gingerly to one side and started to wipe down the oilcloth. Sara just about mustered the energy to lift her wine glass out of his way.

  “There you go,” said Neil, cheerily, tossing the cloth into the sink, and sitting down. He topped up Sara’s wine, sat forward in his chair and loosened his tie.

  “Go on, then,” he said, “today. Talk me through it.”

  He was managing her, she thought – ironing out a human-resources issue.

  “Oh, I don’t know,” she said, “it was just, I didn’t realise it’d be so… that I’d be so…”

  Her voice caught in her throat.

  “Right. What next?” Lou had asked, leading the way back into the kitchen, breathless and pink-cheeked from her Sun Salutations.

  “How about some poetry?” Sara had delved into her English workbox and pulled out a children’s anthology. The boys had sat around the kitchen table, becalmed and amenable-seeming and Sara had leafed through the book, trying to find just the right poem to capitalise on their receptiveness – something fun; something relevant.

  “Ah,” she’d said, smoothing the page, making eye contact with each of them in turn, clearing her throat.

  “Dis Poetry by Benjamin Zephaniah,” she read.

  “Dis poetry is like a riddim dat drops,

  De tongue fires a riddim dat shoots like shots…”

  Out of the corner of her eye, she noticed Dash grin and nudge Caleb, who groaned and lowered his forehead to the table.

  “Dis poetry is designed fe rantin,

  Dance hall style, big mouth chanting,”

  Dash snickered, then clamped both hands over his mouth and lowered his eyes in mock remorse. Caleb remained face down.

  “Dis poetry nar put yu to sleep

  Preaching follow me, like yu is blind sheep…”

  Even to her own ears, she now sounded more Welsh than West Indian and the more her confidence faltered, the worse her accent became. Dash was turning pink with the effort of containing his mirth. Patrick looked at her dumbly, his eyes beseeching her to stop.

  “Dis poetry is not Party Political,

  Nat designed fe dose who are… Right, that’s it!”

  She slammed the book shut and tossed it onto the table. “You can bloody well read it yourselves.”

  ***

  “I think you’re being very hard on yourself,” Neil said. “Just because the first session didn’t go according to plan, doesn’t mean the whole thing’s a write-off. It’s bound to take a bit of time to settle into it. The main thing is that you bounced back. I mean, look, you got through the day. Everyone’s still alive. You did clay modelling, for God’s sake…”

  He waved in the direction of the rudimentary clay figure on the table.

  “Please don’t patronise me, Neil,” Sara said. “I worked my butt off getting ready for today.”

  “I know. I know you did.”

  “And Lou did nothing… well, unless you count boasting about all the airy-fairy people she’s going to get to host workshops one day, when the stars are correctly aligned.”

  “No, well….”

  “So it’s just a bit galling that when I get back after my meltdown, she’s got them improvising street poetry.”

  “Galling? I should have thought you’d be pleased.”

  “Oh, overjoyed, yeah,” said Sara bitterly.“She’s a natural. The kids love her. No eye-rolling, no sniggering – just riffing off each other to create this really cool poem, all very Kate Tempest, very fucking urban.”

  “Isn’t that…” Neil hesitated, “…just the sort of thing you want them to be doing?”

  “Oh, just the sort of thing,” said Sara sarcastically. “Tapping into their creativity. Getting their juices flowing. And tomorrow, guess what?” She waggled her head and imitated Lou’s eager, breathy voice: “We might turn it into a little performance piece.”

  Neil pursed his lips.

  “That’s if the muse condescends to drop in,” she added, “if our chakras are in balance.”

  “Sar…” he said carefully.

  She met his eye, with a glint in hers.

  “I know Lou’s a hard act to follow. She’s got a lot of ideas, a lot of charisma…”

  Sara picked up Dash’s clay model and weighed it in her hand.

  “… but I think it’d be a shame if you let a competitive spirit creep in.”

  Sara squeezed the clay until her hand trembled with the effort of it.

  “This is our kids we’re talking about. I know Lou’s got her shortcomings. She’s a bit flakey. Nowhere near as methodical as you.”

  Sara opened her palm and let the mangled clay tumble back onto the table, then raised her clenched fist above it.

  “But she does also happen to be a bit of a geni– Whoa!”

  The glassware leaped at the blow.

  “Okay,” she said, peeling the pancaked clay calmly off the underside of her fist, “got that. Thanks.”

  23

  Lou continued to be a genius for about a fortnight. Then she started going AWOL. One minute she’d be supervising papier mâché, the next Sara would glance out of the window and see her pacing the garden, phone clamped to her ear. It was amazing, since the home-school had started, how much more complicated and demanding all the other aspects of Lou’s life had, coincidentally, become. There was Gav’s admin to deal with, there was her own work to organise with that secretive demeanour of hers. And then there was The House. You would have
thought, the way Lou talked about The House, that no one else had one, let alone an identical one, in which they were even now sitting, while Lou’s children knocked bits off the already shabby décor. Lou talked about her house as if it were an adversary – a many-headed hydra needing to be slain. There was always something up – problems with the basement conversion, bills to be disputed, arcane insurance arrangements relating to its status as a business premises – it went on and on. Lou’s mobile phone winked constantly on the corner of the kitchen table and whenever it rang, it was, “Just bear with me…”

  Then there were the late starts and the early finishes; the long lunch breaks when the queue in the post office had been “unreal”. There were the times of the month and the times when she was sure she was coming down with something, which necessitated bunking off early, but did not rule out riotous returns by taxi at two the next morning, all too audibly the worse for wear. And yet, despite all of these absences, Sara was still seeing far more of her than was conducive to a healthy friendship.

  Of Gavin, she wasn’t seeing anything like enough. She missed him. She missed their banter on the school run. She missed their casual chats over coffee. She missed their flirtatious drunken arguments, their surreal jokes; the sense that she answered a need in him. The night they’d first discussed home-schooling, Gav had been all for getting stuck in. He’d promised to help the boys build a go-kart and take them beachcombing in Sussex. Perhaps those things would still happen, but it was starting to seem less likely.

  Gav had a lot on his mind, according to Lou. The resin was doing his head in. It was a whole new way of working, learning to grapple with negative space. It was like, well, the only analogy she could think of was learning to walk again after a car crash. Sara wondered what Gav would have made of such hyperbole. She imagined he’d have laughed. Glimpsing him, by chance, from her vantage point at the bedroom window, he hadn’t struck Sara as particularly tormented. There had been no outward signs of existential struggle. On the contrary, she had seen him whistling as he hauled industrial-sized tubs of epoxy from the boot of the car; watched him set off down the road on one of his many mysterious errands, singing along to whatever dross was pouring through his headphones. And on the odd occasion when she found herself, by happy coincidence, putting out the rubbish at the same time as him, he was no less cheery or flirtatious than normal.

  Lou and Sara were supervising one of Lou’s weird and wonderful art sessions when the doorbell rang. It was with some relief that Sara got up to answer it. It was only nine forty-five, but she’d already had enough of batik. It might be okay for the Women’s Collective of Yoruba, as seen on YouTube, but to her way of thinking an intricate hot-wax-based dyeing technique was not the ideal artistic outlet for four boisterous boys.

  She was so overjoyed to find Gav on the doorstep she felt compelled to be rude to him.

  “What happened to your face?”

  “Don’t you like it?” Gav rubbed his hand self-consciously around an incipient beard.

  “No, it’s great. I just thought for a minute Caleb’s guinea pig had come back to life and turned homicidal.”

  “That’s very funny, Sara, thanks. Not making me self-conscious at all.”

  “Aw, thorry,” laughed Sara. “It’s lovely really.” She was reaching out to give his chin a stroke, when Lou materialised from the kitchen, all wifely solicitude.

  “Gav? Nothing’s wrong, is it?” she said, slipping between them with the guile and agility of a crack netball player.

  “Nothing major. Just wondered if you could work your magic on the printer. Bloody thing’s jammed in the middle of the White Cube contract.”

  Sara gawped. If Neil had disrupted her day for something so trivial, well – he would know not to. But Lou was already halfway down the garden path, clucking, not at the pathetic incompetence of her other half, but at the regularity with which technology contrived to fuck up the lives of creative people. Gav gave Sara an apologetic shrug and was about to follow Lou down the path, when Sara had a thought.

  “You could use ours if it’s urgent…”

  “Great!” he said, following her back into the house.

  “Shouldn’t we…?” Sara gestured after Lou’s retreating form, but Gavin flapped his hand dismissively.

  “Needs sorting anyway,” he said.

  Sara led the way upstairs to the study.

  She shuffled some papers out of the way, pulled the office chair out for him, then flicked a switch and the printer hummed into life.

  “It’s all set,” she said, “just bring up your document and away you go.”

  She had got as far as the lower landing when Gav called her back. She could hear raised voices in the kitchen, a petty squabble, like a million others. She hesitated for a moment, thinking of the indelible natural dyes, the hot wax, the seven-year-old boys… Then Gav called again.

  “Sorry, but is this your work? I didn’t want to close it, in case it wasn’t saved.”

  “Oh Christ. Embarrassing.” She leaned over him and stabbed at the keyboard, desperate to get rid of the incriminating paragraph. She could feel the heat from his head, smell his earthy scent.

  “Sorry,” he said, turning his face towards her so that their cheeks almost touched, “I didn’t mean to read it, is it a new novel?”

  “It’s crap,” she said, “I’m not happy with it at all. I’m going to delete it.” She thought of her overripe prose, the plethora of adjectives, the sex… “There you go,” she said, brusquely, bringing up Safari, “I’d better go and check on the kids.”

  “Hey,” he spun round on the chair and caught her hand, “don’t be mad at me. You’ll have to get used to people reading your stuff when you’re published.”

  “Yeah, right.” She tried to pull away. “Like that’s going to happen.”

  “Have some faith in yourself,” he said. “Lou loves your writing.”

  He gazed at her earnestly and she noticed a tiny fleck of brown amid the grey of his iris. Her breathing grew shallow.

  “She’s just being nice. I can’t write. You’ve seen for yourself.”

  The eye contact was too much. It was ridiculous. Look away, she told herself, look away.

  “What I saw was process,” he said gently, “nobody brings their work into the world fully-formed. You have to permit yourself to be an artist, Sara. You have to permit yourself to succeed.”

  It was so much what she wanted to hear that she didn’t trust herself to reply. Her throat was tight; her hand clammy. Embarrassed, she made to withdraw it but he wouldn’t let her. The air felt charged. He circled his thumb in her palm and everything in her that was solid and resolved turned instantly molten and yielding. It was happening, the thing she had been fantasising about for months. He met her eye and smiled slowly, tugging her down onto his knee. The chair swung a little under the extra weight and she felt his erection press into her thigh. She moaned and buried her face in his neck.

  The shouting downstairs had intensified, but it barely impinged any more.

  It was a car crash of a kiss – clumsy and brutal and utterly thrilling. She arched her body away from him and fumbled at her waistband, cursing herself for wearing jeans. He reached down to help her, and the sound of her zip unfastening prompted a gush of readiness in her pants. She had shuffled the denim down as far as her thighs, when she heard the sound of footsteps clattering up the attic steps, the bleating cries of:

  “Mum! Mum!”

  By the time the door flew open, she was on her feet, jumper pulled well down, a full metre away from Gav, and still travelling.

  “You’ve gotta come!” An ashen-faced Patrick yanked her hand. “Come!”

  Adrenaline powered Sara’s descent. She could hear a strange, otherworldly keening coming from the kitchen. Guilt and fear possessed her. She ran into the room.

  “Arlo, love!”

  Arlo was kneeling on the kitchen floor, clutching his face. Caleb crouched beside him, a tentative arm on his shoulder,
while Dash hovered nearby, looking shifty. Sara lifted Arlo’s hand gently from his cheek and gasped. A livid red weal ran from cheek to temple. His eyelid was swollen and glossy, beneath a film of solidifying wax.

  “What happened?” Sara said, her voice tight. Both older boys started talking at once, but then Gav appeared and they fell nervously silent. He handed Sara out of the way, kneeling down and taking his son’s face between his palms.

  “Jesus Christ!” he murmured. “Arlo, mate. How the hell did this happen?” He glanced around the room, taking in the rumpled squares of cloth on the table, the upset bowl of wax, the metal tools, flung every which way, then he looked at Sara – just one, fierce, uncomprehending glance. She hurried over to the sink and started soaking a teatowel in cold water to make a compress.

  Patrick followed her, tugging at her elbow.

  “It was Dash,” he hissed, with a nervous glance over his shoulder, “he flicked wax in Arlo’s face on purpose, ’cos Arlo was taking too long with the tool thing.”

  Amid all the chaos – the running water, the wailing boy, the atmosphere of panic – Sara barely took this in. Afterwards, it would chill her marrow.

  The doorbell rang.

  “That’ll be Lou,” said Gavin and for a moment, everyone held their breath.

  “I’ll go,” said Dash.

  “Tell her to get the car started,” Gavin shouted. “Tell her we’re going to the hospital.”

  Afterwards, Sara would seethe, rehearsing in her mind all the reasons Lou was just as much to blame as she was. Hadn’t batik been her idea? Hadn’t she breezed off to fix Gav’s printer, leaving four small boys unsupervised? But if her anger was tempered with the shaming knowledge of her own complicity, Lou’s seemed untainted by self-doubt. She had entered the kitchen like an avenging angel, screaming at everyone – Sara for letting it happen, Gav for not phoning an ambulance, Patrick and Caleb for getting underfoot. Even poor Arlo got a mouthful, for crying so loudly she couldn’t hear herself think. Only Dash, it seemed, was blameless, which might have struck Sara as ironic, had she had time to think about it.