by Carys Bray
It was after the snow began to melt that the old woman noticed the damage to her house. She was on her way out to the supermarket to look for blocks of insulating marzipan in the January sale, when she observed that the decorative sugar work on the external lintels had been removed. She paced the perimeter of the house and discovered that caramelised sugar swirls had been broken off the window shutters. Gumpaste flowers and butterflies had been disconnected from the fondant ivy and several gingerbread bricks had nibbles gnawed out of them.
The old woman made her way along the B road to the high street. It was hectic in the supermarket. Everyone was busy buying lots of reduced-price items they desperately needed. The old woman filled a basket with slabs of discounted marzipan and joined the long queue for the checkout. When it was almost time for her to pay, she turned to address the line of customers behind her.
‘Please tell your children to stop vandilisationing my house.’ The old woman’s words rattled out of her throat, colliding with people’s ears.
‘She’s definitely German,’ someone whispered. ‘Only a German could invent such a long word. And they don’t know how to behave in queues, either.’
‘Do you have any proof?’ one of the shoppers asked.
‘Our children wouldn’t do such a thing,’ said another.
‘Even if they did, you couldn’t blame them. Everything’s so expensive. With the Post Office gone there’s nowhere to buy penny sweets.’
‘And it’s partly your fault,’ a fourth bargain-hunter accused. ‘Are you trying to lure the kids to your house, or what?’
‘You are rationalisationing,’ the old woman replied. ‘What if I was to shatter-smash your houses?’ The clatter of her consonants caused shoppers who weren’t in the queue to turn and stare.
‘It’s not a proper house, anyway,’ someone called bravely from the cigarette kiosk as the old woman paid and left the shop.
Everyone remembered the old woman’s outburst the following week when two children went missing: they rehearsed her aggression and her threatening behaviour. Of course, no one knew how the story landed on the front page of the Daily Mail, alongside a photograph of the old woman’s grizzled face. The children were found. However, their short-lived absence tailed the old woman, and people buttressed their dislike of her with fear.
The quiet in the wood was heavy and deadening. The old woman stayed indoors as much as possible, despite her need for materials to repair the escalating vandalism to her property. She ventured outside to chop logs, but otherwise kept warm by the stove, calling out a precautionary, ‘Go away’ every so often.
She didn’t hear the children approach. She heard the soft snaps as fondant flowers were plucked from her window box. She rose to her feet and opened the gingerbread door. Outside a boy and girl were gobbling the delicate decorations.
‘I wish you would not be eating my house,’ she said. ‘Please, go away.’
The children paused to consider her.
‘People are scared of you,’ the boy said, cautiously.
The old woman nodded.
‘You are a bit strange,’ added the girl.
‘Are you a wicked witch?’ the boy asked.
‘No.’
‘You’re just a very wrinkly woman, then,’ he said, and he stepped up to the front door where he snapped a cylinder of frosting from its frame. ‘Your house is yummy.’
Anger expanded into the old woman’s chest where it swelled like yeast. She grabbed the boy by his shirt, tumbling him into the house. ‘You will no longer ever be eating my house.’
The girl stepped inside, following her friend as he attempted to scramble to his feet. Both children looked alarmed. The old woman felt pleased. She opened the stove door for fright, for emphasis. Hot air leapt out at the three of them.
‘If you come again I will roast you,’ she blustered.
No one knows what happened next. The children maintained that they ran away, terrified by the old woman’s threat. Newspaper headlines mentioned sticky situations and just desserts. The police report described an ill-fated tumble, a terrible accident. It was all very sad. People tried not to talk about it. It was easier that way. It meant that no one had to wonder whether having osmosed the prevailing sentiment, the children simply pushed the old woman into her stove.
The rescue
The supermarket glows like a sprawling lighthouse in the darkness of the empty car park. The father approaches the entrance and finds a trolley to lean on. As he walks, he catches glimpses of himself in reflective surfaces. Eye bags dip past his cheek bones. They are puffed with the unrealised hopes of constant Googling. Sometimes he does not recognise his reflection in the mirrored glass and metallic fittings, sometimes he feels sorry for the jaded, old man reflected there. He shuffles past the newspaper stand and turns left. He browses the greetings cards, looking for one that he might send to the son. But nothing will do. He trundles aimlessly down the electrical aisle, wondering if the son still has the new kettle. Perhaps he should buy another, in anticipation of the new kettle’s inevitable disappearance. Or perhaps he should buy a microwave to replace the one that vanished last year. It would be a great relief to know that the son might eat something hot, if only for a matter of days or weeks. The father likes to imagine that there is something, either on the internet or in the supermarket, that will jog the son’s memory and rescue him from the world he began to inhabit twenty years ago. It is just a process of elimination, he tells himself. But secretly, in the grotto of his heart, he knows that he is engaged in a much harder operation.
In the beginning he thought the rescue would be easy. Equipped with a Say-No-to-Drugs book and audiocassette, he set out to winch the son to safety.
‘Just say no,’ he pleaded.
The son laughed. ‘Oh fuck off, Dad,’ he said.
‘We aren’t the kind of people who say fuck off to each other,’ the father protested, before he understood that there are worse things than words.
There were more books; books that alternately blamed and encouraged the father. The books all agreed on one thing: the son had to reach rock bottom before things would get better. The father thought that they had reached rock bottom when the son dropped out of college and didn’t take his A levels, despite being predicted a B in maths. Remembering this makes him laugh. His past expectations tickle him like a dry cough.
He thought they were at rock bottom when the son stole five hundred pounds from the mother’s bank account. He thought it again when the son set fire to the house, and when the son borrowed the car and crashed it. The father was certain they were at rock bottom when the son was admitted to the psychiatric hospital, and he followed the nurses around, telling them that the son used to be good at maths in order to give them some idea of the man they were about to rescue.
When the son became homeless the father was convinced that things couldn’t get worse, and then the council housed the son in the basement flat of a block inhabited by social misfits and other drug addicts. Every subsequent, incremental worsening of the son’s life over the intervening years has led the father to think this is it, we are here, at last. And he has settled in, set-up camp, made accommodations and looked for the positive. There is nothing worse than death, he thinks. Where there is life, there is hope, he thinks. There has to be. There is. He won’t have it that there’s not. He is still following every degree of the son’s slide to this elusive, final destination, after which The Rescue will assuredly take place.
There are worse things than death, thinks the mother as she awakes to discover cool, empty sheets where the father ought to be. She lies with her eyes shut for a few moments, trying to trick herself back to sleep, but it’s no use. This is worse than death, she thinks. If the son were dead she would have her memories, but pictures of the man he is are supplanting images of the boy he was, and even her former happiness is unravelling. She wishes that she could start again; disentangle or unpick the son, like a piece of needlework. Like one of the kitschy cross-stitch samplers s
he used to enjoy making with little sayings on: You are my Sonshine and Don’t wait to make your son a great man, make him a great boy. The son is her handiwork, her life’s work, and she doesn’t even like him. His front teeth are grey-brown and perforated. She cries over silly things like his teeth. She wants to say, ‘I drank a pint of milk every day when I was pregnant so that you would have good teeth, and I don’t even like the bloody stuff.’
When he was small, the son used to sit on her knee while he watched television. If she tried to get up, he would hold her arms tight, fasten them about his trunky, little waist and say, ‘Watch me, Mummy! Watch me watching.’ She cannot watch him any more.
There is solace in the twenty-four hour news channels. Whatever the atrocity, she thinks of the mothers: high-school shootings, riots, stabbings, and suicide bombers. Oh, their poor mothers, she thinks. At least her son isn’t a murderer or a rapist. At least he has only ruined his parents’ lives. She often wakes to an empty bed on Fridays and Saturdays, but occasionally the father also makes nocturnal excursions during the week. He says that he pops to the supermarket. But she knows he visits the son as well. She observes the changes in his vital signs: the wretchedness before the visits; the flatlining afterwards, and she is ready with defibrillating cups of tea on his return.
The father manoeuvres his trolley out of the electrical aisle and pauses to stare at a crowd of store employees gathered around a television display. He can see from the banner scrolling across the bottom of the screens that they are watching a twenty-four-hour news channel. He edges toward the crowd.
‘What’s going on?’ he asks a lad with an enormous hole in his earlobe.
‘It’s the rescue,’ the lad says.
The father doesn’t watch the news. He can’t understand why the mother bothers with it: depressing, miserable information from all over the world, brought straight to your front room by eager journalists, who would probably begin each report with ‘Guess what?’ if they could get away with it.
‘What rescue?’
‘You know. The miners. From Chile. They’re about to bring the first one up.’
He has a vague awareness of this story. The mother has mentioned it, he thinks. The lad with the holey ear steps to one side, making space for the father to watch.
The Chilean landscape is lunar, otherworldly. Men in hard hats and puffer jackets are clustered around a bright yellow A-frame. The camera focuses on the ground and the father can see the black edges of a large pipe poking out of the earth like the sides of a dustbin. A cable is winding out of the hole, up and around a cartwheel at the top of the frame, like a giant fishing reel. It is as if they are attempting to angle the miner out of the earth. Eventually, a torpedo-like capsule appears. The assembled crowd clap and cheer and the camera moves to focus on the contorted face of a small boy; it’s all too much for him and his sobs carry over the applause.
The lad with the holey ear wipes his eyes. ‘It’s one of those moments, isn’t it?’ he says. ‘Like 9/11 or Elvis dying. People will remember where they were when this happened.’
The father nods, uncertainly. The capsule is opened and the first miner steps out wearing sunglasses, a red hard hat and a cautious smile. The whistles and cheers resume, but the cries of the miner’s son are again discernible as he rushes to embrace his father.
‘Back to work, then!’ The lad with the odd ear smiles and follows his colleagues toward the bakery, where heaving trolleys are waiting to be unloaded.
The father stays in front of the televisions. He listens to discussions of the miners’ sixty-nine-day captivity, to accounts of what they have been eating and descriptions of the conditions a mile below the earth’s surface. He decides to watch the second rescue. It’s not often that something nice happens on the news. Afterwards, he will buy something edifying for the son, and then he will go home and have a bit of a snooze before work.
The second miner is quite a character. He cheers and shouts and repeatedly hugs the Chilean president. The father smiles as he watches. I’ll just stay for one more, he thinks. He will be especially tired at work, but what can they do about it? He’s only two years off retirement. After the third miner emerges, the father decides that he has time to watch the fourth and cautiously removes a dining chair from a display in the central aisle. He sits down in front of a television with the empty trolley at his side.
The mother climbs out of bed and explores the carpet with tentative, slipper-finding feet. Downstairs, she fills the kettle, switches on the television, and is suddenly glad to have woken. She sits on the sofa with a steaming mug of tea and watches as the fourth miner is freed. She has a little cry, calls herself a silly old cow, and boils the kettle again in preparation for the fifth rescue.
The fifth man is the youngest, she learns, as she flattens a teabag with the back of her spoon. His mother will be delighted, she thinks. She sits down again and waits for the rescue capsule to surface. It is almost eight o’clock in the morning. The father will be late for work if he doesn’t come home to get ready soon. She wonders exactly how long he has been gone and what he has bought. She is angry with him. She is sorry for him. And it is at moments like these that she despises the son. It has been a surprise to realise that her love is not elastic, that it doesn’t stretch as far or run as deep as the father’s; he still talks about rescue and rehab, still believes that change is possible. But no one can force the son. He has human rights, even though what is left of him is hardly human at all.
At eight o’clock, the lad with the holey ear comes back. ‘Finished my shift,’ he says. ‘Can’t believe you’re still here. Are you all right?’
‘Last one,’ says the father. ‘Then I’m off home.’
‘What number is this?’
‘Number five. The youngest of them all. He’s just a boy, really.’
They watch the television in companionable silence. The cable twists up from the depths of the earth and out of the dustbin-width of pipe. Finally the rescue capsule emerges. The excitement of the miner’s father is palpable, his smile joyous. Father and son embrace.
The holey-eared lad blinks tears away. ‘I’m going home to watch the rest of it,’ he says.
The father nods to him and gets up from the borrowed dining chair. He leaves it next to the empty trolley and walks outside into daylight. If he hurries he can get home in time to change for work. But he doesn’t go home. He drives across the city to a concrete tower block. He parks on the double yellow lines outside and, ignoring the keypad at the entrance, gives the reinforced door a shove. It opens as he knew it would. The tenants always leave it unlatched. He approaches the concrete stairs and begins the walk down, below ground level. The stairwell smells like a multi-storey car park. Piss stains and needles decorate each landing.
The son lives at the very bottom. The corridor that leads to his flat is long and cavernous. Two fluorescent light strips are bolted to the ceiling. One is smashed, the other sputters dimly. When he reaches the son’s door, he stops. The door is blue and it’s stained in one corner with a fine spray of what looks to be blood. Obscenities are scrawled over it in permanent marker, and the number has been broken off. He could probably kick the door down. If he really wanted to, he could boot it off its hinges, storm inside, and drag the son from his bed, or the sofa, or the floor. He could haul the son’s bony frame over his shoulder, climb the concrete staircase and bundle him into the car. But he doesn’t. He steps back until his spine touches the solid corridor wall, and then he edges to the floor. The cold of the concrete seeps through his trousers, as he waits in the shadows for someone to rescue his son.
Wooden Mum
At night, after I put Tom and Letty to bed, after I finish sitting outside Tom’s bedroom door to stop him coming downstairs, after I finish telling him not to switch the light on, and not to strip the bed, after he stops laughing and banging the wall with his fist, when he is finally asleep, I go downstairs to tidy up. His cars ring the perimeter of the lounge. Sometimes they a
re ordered by colour, sometimes by model, sometimes by imperceptible nuances invisible to my neurotypical eyes. I put them away and close up Letty’s dolls’ house. There are often cars in the tiny dolls’ kitchen, sitting at the table opposite the wooden, cotton-haired boy and girl. Sometimes there’s a Dalek in the living room, behind the sofa where wooden Dad sits, oblivious. I search for wooden Mum who is frequently not in either of the first-floor bedrooms. I open the roof and check in the nursery. There are times when the cot leans, balanced precariously on a pile of quilted dolls’ bedding, and wooden Mum is hidden underneath. There are times when she is lying in the bath under a jumble of tiny towels or crouching in the wooden dog’s kennel. I rescue her and put her to sleep in the master bedroom. She always looks pleased because Letty has cut a gory, biro smile into her round, peg face.
I am usually cheerful. Mostly reconciled to things. There are two occasions when I remember crying. The first was in the car, at the top of Fore Street after driving the babysitter home. I had to pull over. Once I could see again, I wiped my nose on my sleeve and drove home. My face was dappled and streaked with mascara. I ploughed straight up the stairs, passing Stuart on the landing. He was on the phone to his mother.
‘I’m going to bed.’ My voice jellied around the words.
‘You got what you wanted,’ he replied, placing his hand over the telephone mouthpiece. ‘You got your label. Hope you’re happy.’
I ignored his contempt. He ignored my streaky cheeks and parched eyes.
The other occasion was yesterday evening before the putting away of Tom’s cars, before the coaxing of bedtime. It happened when Stuart got home from work and I started to tell him about the sign in Tom’s classroom. The sign must have been there all term. I noticed it at home time yesterday because Tom forgot his lunch bag, and I slipped into the classroom to help him find it. The sign is on the wall above the teacher’s desk, next to a photograph of Tom. In the photograph he is wearing a blue plastic apron and holding a paintbrush. Behind him an easel grips another of his entirely green paintings. The person who was taking the picture must have shouted, ‘Smile!’ But the sweet-wrapper twists at the corners of his mouth don’t negate Tom’s frown. The accompanying sign reads, ‘My name is Tom Parsons. I have Asperger Syndrome. I have behavioural problems.’ A smaller, unrelated sign below says, ‘In order to promote the children’s self-esteem we do not correct spellings or use red pen.’
