by Evie Wyld
‘Yes, that sounds like her – she’s one of those germ people, she always carried wet wipes, I seem to remember.’ My mother says this as though it is the very worst thing she can think of.
‘Christopher is trying to look after her, I think.’
‘Soft fool,’ she says, though not unkindly.
‘What’s her story?’
‘Well, I suppose it’s that ghastly business with Mr Hamilton. Your father couldn’t bear her of course.’
There’s a long silence. I think about how a distant relation would talk about my life in thirty years’ time. Well, she house-sat for a time and then just stayed indoors mostly.
‘It’s not great, is it?’ I say out loud.
‘It’s not, no.’ Mum slaps her thighs loudly. ‘Come on then, you stupid old cow,’ she says to the dog, who lifts her narrow head to look at her. ‘Come on, I’ll take you to the park and you can kill something.’ The dog drags herself out of the bed, yawns so that her tongue curls, and she stretches her toes, pointing them behind her like a dancer. She gives me a friendly nose and I thumb her warty cheek. Her muzzle has gone grey in the last six months and there’s a wobble in her back legs that we don’t speak about. Mum puts a hand on my head as she walks by. ‘I shouldn’t have said anything about the ghost. Honestly, she’s as harmless as air.’
The dog sneezes. ‘Poo bags, keys, lead,’ says my mother and once she’s heading down the stairs I call after her, ‘I don’t believe in ghosts, so that’s fine.’ But she doesn’t hear or at least doesn’t respond.
It is just like my mother to tell me about a ghost in the house in which I am staying, alone, and then to tell me that there’s absolutely nothing to worry about. That is exactly her game.
‘Eat some fruit,’ she calls from the front door. ‘Your sister still sends those ghastly boxes – there are more unripe pears and fucking kohlrabi than I know what to do with.’ She slams the door and I hear her thud down the stairs to the pavement. She is not light on her feet, steps deliberately every time. It is just like my mother to leave the house as soon as she has a visitor.
I text Vincent, ask if we can change it to a drink.
Thank god – I didn’t realise ceramics meant bowls and mugs.
What did you think it meant?
I don’t know, just something more exciting. Maybe something to do with pastry actually.
The pest man arrives at five o’clock and is youngish with a West Country accent. He is enthusiastic about his job.
‘I get to see some interesting places,’ he says brightly as I show him into my mother’s bedroom.
‘I bet you do,’ I say and immediately become worried that I’ve accidentally come on to him. He is up in the roof space, just his legs visible on the ladder, his large yellow sand boots. It would be strange to offer him tea because he will spend his time in the house balanced on a ladder, perhaps handling rat poison, and I hate making tea for people. The idea of leaving him alone in my mother’s bedroom is not good. So I try to make conversation.
‘What’s the, er, strangest thing you’ve found in someone’s roof space?’
He pops his face down so I can see it, says brightly, ‘Found a dead body once, that was pretty mad.’ He pops his head back up.
I feel an instant and robust warmth towards him. ‘Oh,’ I say. There are questions that I can’t begin to formulate.
‘Yeah – had to stay all day with the police, and it was October so had loads of work on. Animals start to cosy up in the autumn.’
‘Sure!’ I say. I find that I am sitting on the bed, and I wonder how inappropriate that might be. He saw me when he poked his head down, and so it would be weird to move now. ‘I found a body once, too,’ I say, but I don’t say it loud enough and he doesn’t hear me.
‘It’s clean,’ he says, and for a moment I can’t locate what we are talking about. He starts down the ladder, his torch in his hand. ‘Can’t see any mess. But I’ll lay a few traps, in case they’ve only just moved in.’
I stand. ‘Great.’
‘I’ll just run to the van and get them,’ he says, smiling. He has a dark freckle that overlaps his top lip.
‘What had happened to the man you found?’
He shrugs like the question had never crossed his mind. ‘Woman. Not sure. She just died up there. All got to go sometime, isn’t it?’ And he ducks out of the room and pads down the stairs, whistling a familiar tune.
We have all got to go at some time. And it’s not the deadness, really. It’s being thrown away, the logistics of packing her away into a suitcase only marginally bigger than the hand-luggage allowance on a domestic flight. I sit back down on the bed. Her boyfriend killed her with a wire cord, stuffed her into a suitcase, set the suitcase on fire in their backyard and threw what was left into the sea. It was as easy as that to become dead. But there was a photograph and a name and all the story of that day and how she died and how her boyfriend hanged himself later, in his cell, and the child left behind.
The ladder is still leaning into the roof space. The black square of the hatch is bigger than I thought it would be. When it’s closed it disappears as part of the ceiling, but now it feels like the house has grown. It feels bigger inside than it is on the outside. I climb the ladder slowly, listening for his footsteps on the stairs. The black is thick, as if it has been sealed up there. It smells of old damp photographs, the faintest scent of camphor. Without a torch I can see nothing. Not even the wind outside penetrates the space, no traffic noise, no house creak, no distant burglar alarm. But I have the feeling of the individual scales of my skin lifting, of every hair standing up like it is magnetised. I start back down, and nearly fall when I see he’s there, holding the ladder.
‘Oops,’ he says. ‘Careful there.’ He steadies me by placing a hand on my thigh, and I flush red.
‘Sorry,’ I say, climbing down and trying to be brisk, but with the awful knowledge that he can see how red I’ve gone. ‘I just . . .’
‘Oh, everyone’s always curious,’ he says lightly, ‘everyone always wants to look – it’s natural.’ He is standing very close and there is a sudden, unsettling intensity to him. Is he talking about something else? He has no smell about him at all, no aftershave, no deodorant, no sweat or coffee breath. No toothpaste, no washing detergent.
‘I just wondered how big it was.’ Everything sounds like the start of a porno.
He smiles and the freckle lifts on his face. I sidestep so that I’m no longer between him and the ladder. I am careful to step away from and not towards the bed.
He holds up his two metal traps and the atmosphere may have never existed.
‘Peanut butter is the most tasty thing to a squirrel – or a rat. So we’ll get anyone passing through.’
He climbs back up humming his tune.
‘Now, if you hear the trap go off – it’ll be like a loud thump – then ninety per cent of the time that’s it, game over, they’re very effective. But if you hear it go off, and then there’s some scrabbling about, we might have to come and dispatch things ourselves. Obviously we’d rather that didn’t happen – and honestly, ninety per cent of the time it comes down on the back of the neck and that’s it. And it might not happen at night when you’re in here, so if you don’t hear anything, but there’s a smell . . .’
He climbs back down, screwing the lid on a jar of peanut butter. He licks his finger. ‘Anyway, I’ll be back in around a week to check them, but if you do hear anything, or smell anything, call me and I’ll come round sooner.’ He smiles and I smile and I show him to the front door.
Before walking down the steps into the front garden, he turns and says, ‘It’s been a pleasure meeting you,’ and for a second it is there again, enough that I close the door and lean against it and wonder what has happened. I can hear him whistling on the way to his van and I sing along, Down deep in his soul, she can bring him such misery.
I am twenty minutes late to meet Vincent, but then he is another ten. I am late because I h
aven’t done any washing for a while and I had to go out to the high street and find something to wear. It was harder than I remembered. There was a time, I’m sure of it, when any old shit fitted just fine, and suddenly just a normal black T-shirt makes me look like I think too much of myself. When, I wonder, looking in the mirror of the changing room, did my tits get weird?
I end up choosing a top which is too big for me, because the smaller sizes highlight bad things I don’t want to think about. It has a pattern – almost everything in the shop has a pattern. It is the kind of shop that only sells cropped trousers, and sneaks in a little embroidery here and there on something that should be perfectly ordinary. It is a shop for the mothers of children. Polka dots on every garment, even if it’s in the lining of a jacket. I look like a virgin in my big top, I look outdoorsy and maybe even a bit Christian, but at least I don’t smell of soup. It has a Scandinavian leaf pattern and a useless pocket on the breast.
‘I think it’s great,’ says Vincent once we are settled at a small table in the back of the pub, ‘that you can wear stuff like that.’
‘Like what?’
‘You know,’ he says, ‘like young and old at the same time. I think that’s very cool.’
Vincent is wearing a T-shirt that has two howling wolves on it. At a guess I would say it was ironic, but I feel sometimes so confused by him, I can’t say for sure.
We stay out late, drink fast. We kiss and he puts his change in the pocket on my chest, but I wake up alone. I don’t recall what kind of kiss it was. It can’t have been all that great if he’s not here. There is a bubble of excitement which gets burst by the hangover and I take an antihistamine and a handful of Kalms and go back to bed for the day. When I wake again it is dark out, and I feel foggy, but know I need to get up to Scotland. I stand in the shower and let the water fall in my face. I should eat. I boil pasta, I eat it out of the pot with some olive oil and salt on it. I eat it too quickly and want to go back to bed, but instead I put my shoes on.
The drive up to Scotland is a silent one tonight. I don’t feel like singing. I am not relishing sleeping again in the house. I am jumpy with a hangover, and will think about Mum’s ghost; I imagine some horrifying Victorian child with blue circles under her eyes and a bent neck. It is cold exhaustion – hang overs have recently become long and insidious. I remember hangovers before guilt. Those days of waking at noon and eating a burger and watching TV, maybe with friends. Laughter about your bad behaviour the night before. Plans to get drunk again soon. Now there is a shake in my wrists and a feeling that someone has a hold of my head and is pushing it down to rest on the steering wheel, while they tell me every little loathsome thing about my behaviour the night before and how that marries up perfectly with the badness that seeps out of me. I am bad like a bad dog.
Every time I pass one of those signs Tiredness can kill I think about all the other things that can kill just as simply and comprehensively. If the pest man had kissed me I would have kissed him back, when Vincent kissed me I kissed him back. What was the difference? Dom once placed his hand on my lower back and pulled me towards him; when I avoided his mouth he mumbled into my neck, ‘I love what a fuck-up you are, it’s so sexy you’re such a mess. I bet you fuck like a beast.’ I stopped him talking by kissing him, and then made out that if only I wasn’t his wife’s sister then we’d be at it. He liked that. Sometimes I imagined explaining to Katherine what had happened. I only did it so he would stop and that would be the end of it. He only likes me because I’m another version of you. It’s his varied diet he’s always on about. Kombucha, turtle beans, a black girl, a white girl with red hair, sisters broken in entirely different ways.
When I reach the house I stand outside it in the dark for a few moments. I can hear the waves on the beach, the wind rattling the windows. I turn and look up at the stars, see how they frame the Law, and the moon lights up the whalebones, cold and white and beautiful.
I don’t turn on any lights in the house, I climb the stairs and crawl under the duvet in Mrs Hamilton’s bed, and I am so grateful to feel the heaviness of sleep on my back, like someone lying on top of me. If there are dreams they leave me alone.
I am woken by Deborah rapping loudly on the open door of the bedroom, looking at me with horror.
‘I emailed you – I have buyers coming in fifteen minutes.’ She turns and leaves and I hear her huffily scurrying about the place turning on heaters, spritzing the rooms that smell of damp and loudly putting the chairs under the table in the kitchen. When I come downstairs, she is striking matches in the sitting room.
‘To give the sense of fire,’ she says, with a hand gesture like she expects me to be impressed. ‘Anyway. Did you remake the bed?’
‘I did. I arrived late last night, I—’ She sends a look up and down me. The meaning of the look is clear. I can see why my father didn’t like her. She is very like a French teacher I had who made all the girls learn by heart, Excusez-moi, madame, j’ai mes règles, s’il vous plaît, permettez-moi d’avoir une serviette hygiénique et de me diriger vers les toilettes.
‘That’s fine. We’ll be done in an hour.’ She does not want the details. She looks at me expectantly. She is waiting for me to leave. Obviously I am not the kind of person she wants them to imagine living here.
I drink a coffee in a cafe that calls itself the Pavilion, even though I remember the old Pavilion from before the outdoor pool was filled in, and it did not have photographs of young Italian couples amusing each other in roadside cafes while the elders look on. It didn’t sell panini with the stripes painted on, and there were no inspirational words written around the picture rail. Energy, Good times, Cappuccino, Laughter, Love. And then, as though an outsider had burst into their meeting, Bicycle. The window next to me is framed by condensation. Dad walked into my bedroom once without knocking and saw what I’d been doing to my legs, and he shouted at me, like a dog barking at a car. And later on I heard him drunk on the phone, rabid, leaving a message on the school’s answering machine, What have you done to her you cunts, and I pretended not to know he had done this, and I moved schools and never had my period in France.
I hear Maggie before I see her. She has forced the young woman behind the counter to give her a high five and says ‘Livin’ the dream’ loudly so that everyone turns to look. The woman behind the counter turns away with a wide smile of discomfort. Maggie is wearing a grey air force jumpsuit with a black canvas bag over her shoulder. Her hair explodes from her head in a way that is suggestive of a lot of time spent having sex and almost none spent on styling her hair. She wears her sunglasses indoors and her trainers are red leather with their laces undone. Her lipstick is electric pink. Her outfit highlights that the rest of us are wearing Gore-tex and windbreakers and gilets. She is beautiful, and along with everyone else in the cafe, I hope she will go away.
And yet, when she turns to survey us while she waits for her takeaway coffee, I raise my hand. She sees me and instantly I flush because now everyone will think we are friends.
‘Ah fucking hell, hen, how are you?!’ Maggie almost shouts, eliciting a tut from a woman feeding her child a bun, and she pulls a chair from a nearby table, occupied by a man and his breakfast – she doesn’t ask to take the chair, and there is a stool at my table, but instead she takes this high-backed chair and sits on it backwards like she’s Arthur Fonzarelli. There is not an audible intake of breath, but there is the equivalent in silence. The man with his breakfast looks on in disbelief, though what can he say – he wasn’t using the chair, it is not his chair. He still looks as though he might throw down his knife and fork in fury and demand answers.
Maggie smells of cigarettes and woodsmoke. Has she been camping?
‘I’m fine, thanks.’ I nod overly enthusiastically, whispering loudly in the hope it will suggest that she should lower her voice.
‘Any more weird men following you?’ She is so loud.
‘Ha, no – any more ice creams?’
‘What?’
The waitress brings her coffee in a takeaway cup and Maggie irritates her by drinking it with me instead. It’s 15p more to drink in so technically Maggie is stealing from them. I will leave a tip to take this into account.
‘So, what you doing today?’ she asks after blowing on her drink.
‘Just having a coffee, you know. Before I get stuck into work,’ I say.
‘Sounds like you need a day off.’ She puts four cubes of white sugar in her coffee.
‘I’m fine. And what are you doing?’
‘Taking a day off.’ She smiles over the rim of her paper cup.
‘What is it that you do?’ If she told me in the car it hasn’t stuck.
‘I’m a witch.’ She says it simply and confidently and it is the single most irritating thing I’ve ever heard anyone say.
‘Oh, really?’ I try to think of what might be an acceptable follow-up question to ask. ‘Do you make money from that?’
She grimaces, swallowing her coffee. She has left a large smudge of lipstick on her cup but it doesn’t seem to have affected the colour of her lips.
‘Nah, I’m either unemployed or self-employed, depending on how you look at it. But what about you? How come you’re procrastinating about a day off?’
‘Oh, I wasn’t, I have to work.’ I try to smile ruefully. Maggie laughs as though I have told a joke.
‘So,’ she says, ‘what shall we do with our day off?’
‘Really, I—’
‘Listen,’ she says, ‘I’m planning on drinking this coffee and then walking up the Law and smoking a joint at the top. Then I’ll get fish and chips down on the beach and feed the seagulls. And then I’m going to have a drink in the pub. I’m doing this because I’m tired and bored with myself. Hey now, baby,’ she says, pointing at me, ‘I could use just a little help.’ And she starts singing, not loudly, though other customers can hear; she sings directly at me, a competent voice, and I sit drinking my coffee too quickly so I don’t have to think of what to do.
