by Alison Moore
Gloria turned and led the way upstairs, her scent trailing behind her, and Futh followed.
In the living room, Gloria guided him past the dining table – already set with place mats, cutlery, wine glasses and crackers – to a seat on the sofa beside the roaring log fire. She filled a tumbler from a jug of mulled wine on the coffee table and pressed it into his hand. He took a few medicinal gulps of the piping hot wine and then leaned forward and put the glass down. Gloria topped up her own glass and sat down beside him, slipping off her mules and crossing her legs towards him, poking playfully at his leg with her big toe. He looked down at her bare foot, her hot-pink nail varnish.
‘Your father’s in a bad mood,’ she said.
‘Ah,’ said Futh. ‘Where is he?’
‘He’s in the kitchen.’
‘I should go and say hello.’ Futh leaned forward again, preparing to stand.
Gloria, putting her hand, her honeysuckle-pink fingernails, on his thigh, said, ‘No, you shouldn’t.’ Futh, after a pause, during which he picked up his glass again and took another scalding swig, settled back into his seat. Gloria’s fingers plucked at his trouser leg, tugging at a loose thread. ‘You’ve nobody looking after you,’ she said.
Futh glanced at her. Firelight glinted off her oversized earrings. He looked away. Already he was feeling sedated by the mulled wine and the heat, pickled and roasted like his father’s pork hocks. Once more he went to stand up, got to his feet and went to the window.
Outside, everything was buried under inches of snow. Futh leaned his forehead against the cool windowpane and watched a boy building an igloo in a back garden, the boy’s breath visible in the cold air.
‘Come back over here,’ said Gloria. ‘It’s lovely and warm by the fire.’
Futh stayed where he was for a moment, gazing out, as if he had not heard her. Then, lifting his head and turning away from the window, he walked back to the sofa. He sat down where he had been and Gloria returned her painted fingertips to his thigh. She moved her face a fraction closer to his and said, ‘You look so much like your father.’
‘I’m not like him at all,’ said Futh.
‘You’re more like your mother,’ said Gloria.
Futh watched the fire blazing in the hearth.
‘She left very suddenly, didn’t she?’ said Gloria. ‘She just disappeared.’
‘Yes,’ said Futh, ‘she did.’
There was a thud behind them and Futh looked up to see his father standing there with oven gloves on his hands, a roasted chicken on the dining table.
Gloria lifted her hand from Futh’s leg and wrapped it around her glass. Standing, slipping her feet into her mules, she went to stand beside Futh’s father, saying, ‘That looks lovely,’ but he was already walking away again.
He returned with a dish of vegetables and two bottles of wine. One bottle was almost empty and he poured the last inch into his glass, drinking half of it before raising the dregs to nobody in particular. ‘To family,’ he said.
Gloria sat herself down, straightening her cutlery and laying her napkin over her lap. Futh came over from the fire and took his place at the table. His father uncorked the other bottle of wine and emptied it into the three large glasses. He carved the chicken while Gloria dished out vegetables.
Futh took his plate and his father said, ‘So Angela’s leaving you.’
‘We’re separating,’ said Futh, lifting his cutlery, ‘yes.’
‘What did you do?’ asked his father.
‘What?’
‘Why’s she leaving you?’
‘I didn’t do anything,’ said Futh.
‘She got bored,’ said his father.
Gloria reached over and gave Futh’s leg a consolatory pat and a squeeze.
Futh put down his cutlery and stood up. He was closer to the window but went to the fire, crouching down in front of it and picking up the poker.
‘Some women,’ said Gloria, ‘don’t appreciate what they’ve got.’
Futh, stoking the still-raging fire, said quietly to himself, ‘And some people don’t know what’s theirs and what’s not.’
He did not hear his father moving from the table and crossing the room. He only knew someone was standing behind him when he was pulled up by his collar, turned around and smacked. He dropped the poker and it fell at his feet, its red-hot tip singeing the carpet. His father returned to the table. Futh picked up the poker, put it back where it belonged, followed his father back to the table and sat down.
They pulled their crackers and put on their paper hats. Gloria got a paste necklace in her cracker and wore that too, and they listened to the Christmas service on the radio.
After lunch, a rug was moved from another part of the room and placed in front of the hearth, covering the scorch mark made by the poker. ‘There you are, you’d never know,’ said Gloria, turning back the corner of the rug with her foot to take another look at the blackened carpet, poking at it with her bare toe.
His hangover is getting worse. Futh, drinking more water, wishes that he had thought to pack aspirin. He thinks about showering but just gets dressed instead, putting the lighthouse in his pocket and applying new plasters to his messed-up heels before pulling on his thick walking socks and, steeling himself, his boots. Then, zipping up his honeymoon suitcase and leaving it by the door ready for transfer, he sets off.
He walks two miles just looking for an open bakery. It is almost midday before he begins the day’s hiking.
His route takes him across cornfields and then into forest. It is late August, almost autumn, harvest time, but for now the leaves are still green and there are blackberries on the bushes. The undergrowth is busy with mice and lizards and the air is full of darting insects nipping at him.
There are rain clouds gathering and the darkening sky and the forest canopy make it feel like dusk even in the early afternoon. Here and there, he emerges into daylight, coming to viewpoints overlooking the Rhine. It is possible to see a long way, to see miles of river and railway track, boats and trains on their way to Koblenz or Bonn, or further, to Cologne or Düsseldorf, or further still towards Rotterdam and Utrecht and the North Sea. But he is not looking, is unable to think of anything except how much his feet hurt.
When he rests, he feels his feet throbbing inside his boots. He knows that his plasters have come away, but if he takes off his boots he does not think he will ever put them back on. He continues on his way, the path returning him to the gloomy forest.
He walks ever more slowly as the afternoon wears on. The path seems never-ending but the viewpoints have tailed off. In the fading light, Futh, with everything but a torch in his backpack, begins to feel that the path might now be taking him deeper and deeper into the forest and that he might never find his way out. He could believe that the trees themselves were, in the darkness, shifting and spreading around him, to enclose him, to keep him there. He can barely see where he is treading, cannot tell what it is that his boots sink into here or what cracks beneath them there. At one point, he stops and considers turning back, remembering something he has read about deep-sea divers getting confused about which way is up, thinking that they are surfacing even as they dive deeper. But he ploughs on, and finally the trees thin out and he emerges from the forest into the twilight, returning to civilisation, and the streetlights are coming on to light his way.
He has passed the midpoint of his circular walk, has walked more miles than he has left to go. He will be back at his starting point, back in Hellhaus, by the end of the week, and every step now takes him closer.
He abandons the rest of the day’s hiking. Finding his way to the station, he catches a train to his next overnight stop, resting his miserable feet and leaning his head on the rattling window against which the rain has begun to fall.
‘There were still shipwrecks,’ his father said, ‘after the lighthouse was built.’
Futh’s mother was sunbathing in a bikini top and shorts. She had taken off her walking boots and soc
ks and stretched out her bare feet, but Futh still had his on. His father was wearing ordinary shoes and ruining them.
His mother liked to walk and Futh liked to go with her. There were hills where they lived, where the houses ended. You left the shop on the corner with your quarter pound of sweets in a paper bag and walked across a field and there you were, going up into the hills. The hills skirted the town. It was possible to walk for miles along the top without losing sight of their house, although his mother always kept walking until she did, humming tunes which were lost to the wind. His father never came, and his mother no longer asked him.
Up on the cliffs in Cornwall, his father was talking about wrecking and plundering, and telling some story about a ghost ship crashing over and over again into the rocks around the lighthouse, and Futh saw his mother rolling her eyes. He had seen this before, his mother fidgeting while his father held forth. This was how it always began, with his father going on in this manner and his mother rolling her eyes and twitching and sighing like some creature stirring. If, after some time, his father was still talking, his mother would begin with her provocative interjections. ‘Nobody’s listening,’ she would say, or, ‘Nobody cares.’ And then perhaps there would be silence, or perhaps his father’s temper would flare – he lost his temper easily but it was all over just as quickly.
She gave a great sigh. His father was oblivious. ‘The light,’ he said, ‘flashes every three seconds and can be seen from thirty miles away. In fog, the foghorn is used.’
Futh wandered off, as if there might be somewhere to escape to. He had in his hand the perfume, the silver lighthouse, which he had taken out of his mother’s handbag. Returning after a short while with the glass vial out of its silver case, he found his father still talking about foghorns, or perhaps he had been waiting and was just picking up where he had left off, and his mother said without opening her eyes, ‘Do you know how much you bore me?’
Futh watched his father silently placing the remains of the picnic in the cool box, packing the plastic plates and beakers into the rucksack, putting the lid on the Thermos of cold coffee and shaking off the picnic blanket on which only he had been sitting, a breeze getting up as he tried to fold it. Finally, with everything packed away, his father stood still. He looked at his wife lying in the grass with the sun on her, and Futh watched the gulls. He watched them until his mother, standing, said, ‘I’m going home,’ and then, looking down, he saw his hand and the blood where he was cut, the little bottle broken, his mother’s perfume in his wound.
The same afternoon, they collected their luggage from the caravan site and took the train back from Cornwall. His mother changed in the toilets, swapping her sun clothes for travelling clothes and putting on shoes with heels, slipping them off again as soon as she sat down.
When the train was moving, his father went to the buffet car and did not return until they were almost home. His mother fell asleep with her bare feet on the grubby floor, her short, pale-blond hair resting against the dirty window. The perfume case, containing the broken glass vial, was in Futh’s pocket. She might have known he had it, but did not ask for it back. His unwashed hands and his boots smelt strongly of violets. His mother smelt of the leftover orange she had eaten in the carriage before falling asleep. Years later, when Futh worked in the manufacturing of artificial odours, the smell of octyl acetate would make him feel sad.
He knew, sitting there on the rushing train, that his mother was leaving them. He knew that when the train reached their station, the holiday would be over and then she would go. He wanted the train to slow down; he wanted it never to stop. He wanted his mother to keep on sleeping, his father to stay in the bar. But the train sped on and the daylight went and through the windows, in the dark, Futh glimpsed the names of the stations they were hurrying through and he knew that they were almost home. His father returned from the bar, and the noise he made coming into the carriage looking for his seat woke Futh’s mother, and the train slowed, and trundled to a stop.
Futh can’t for the life of him remember his mother’s favourite song, how it goes, and as he walks from the train station to that night’s hotel he keeps humming at it, trying to pin it down. In the end, he almost has it.
Arriving at the hotel in wet boots, he finds that it has an indoor porch where other walkers have left their muddy footwear. He does the same, stowing his in a spare corner for the night.
Getting his key, he goes to his room and straight into the bathroom to run a hot bath. While he waits for the tub to fill he looks around the bedroom. He approves of the décor. The curtains and the bedding are made of the same material, with a nature theme which is echoed in the watercolour over the bed and the embroidered cover of the cushion on the armchair. The colours are picked out in the paint on the walls and the woodwork. He appreciates such womanly touches. He would like something like this in his flat.
He is satisfied by the sight of a fire escape immediately outside the window.
He undresses, packing his clothes straight into his suitcase, trying to keep the clean things separate from the dirty things. He thinks about doing some stretches like he used to have to do at school before running. He tries to touch his toes but can’t quite reach them and even then it hurts the backs of his legs. At first this makes him feel old, but then he recalls not being able to do it at school either. He was never any good at running anyway. He sits down on the edge of the bed and does some ankle exercises but they are excruciating.
He goes into his suitcase and takes out his alarm clock, sets it for the morning and puts it by the bed. On his way back to the bathroom, he stops by the window to look at the view beyond the fire escape – the night sky, the dark hillside, the moonlit river. He thinks of opening the window to let the night air in and discovers that the window frame is painted shut.
He steps gingerly into the tub, his raw heels stinging. As he lowers himself in, slowly reclining his weary torso, the deep water rises up. It washes against his jaw and his cheeks like waves against the hull of a boat and closes over his head.
CHAPTER TEN
Memorabilia
Ester strides along the pavement, the heels of her new stilettos beating like tiny war drums against the concrete slabs.
She began her afternoon at the hairdresser’s, where she had her hair cut short again and bleached the platinum blond she had worn in her early twenties. The girl tried to persuade her to have a warmer shade, but Ester was adamant.
Afterwards, browsing the clothes shops, Ester found herself looking at a window display, at a mannequin wearing a strapless dress with a corset bodice and a knee-length skirt, satin in her favourite shade of pink, like the Blushing Pink she had chosen for the bedroom walls. She stood there on the pavement for a while, looking in through the window at the dress and at the mannequin whose hard, expressionless face was turned away from her.
It was some time since she had been shopping for clothes. She took the dress to the changing room, pragmatically choosing one a size larger than she had been the last time she wore anything like this, before buying the dress one size larger than that. She also bought some shoes, the same shade with a stiletto heel.
She stopped at a café for a sandwich and a beer. She went into the toilets to change into her new outfit, noticing that her dress matched the toilet paper. Leaving her old clothes and shoes behind, she set off home.
Marching through Hellhaus in ten-centimetre heels, she knows she does not look like the girl she once was. The hairdresser was right. The severe cut and cold blond now make her look tired. She is broader and heavier than she was and her calves are fleshy beneath the hem of her new dress. But she walks with the same swing in her arms, the same sway in her hips, and her flesh and bones remember something of herself at twenty-one.
She was aware of Bernard before she met him. He was always a topic of conversation at Ida’s house. When Ester was not at Ida’s, she was often with Conrad and his friends, who also knew Bernard. Someone would ask about him, or someone
would have news or gossip about him, about what he was doing, who he was with, when he was coming home. Bernard was only a little older than his brother, but Ester sometimes thought that he made Conrad – who still lived at home with his mother and still knocked about with his schoolmates – seem like a child.
She met a few of Bernard’s ex-girlfriends, all of whom were thin and blond and well-dressed. She heard stories about him punching boys for talking too long to his girlfriends, and one about him pushing a stranger down a flight of stairs for just looking. ‘He hit me with a bottle,’ one boy told her, showing off a faint scar above his eyebrow, ‘for dancing with his girl.’
After she and Bernard became a couple, he was jealous around her too. He did not like other men looking at her, although he never hit them, and Ester wondered why not, why he had cared more about his previous girlfriends.
On their first date, they saw a film, and Ester kept the cinema ticket, at first just in her purse and later in an envelope with everything else – a few postcards, a beer mat on which he had written his telephone number, a dried flower from a walk they had taken, and a dead leaf she had found in her hair afterwards.
She still has these things. She keeps them in the drawer of her bedside table and looks through them sometimes, putting the dry flower to her nose. She handles the envelope’s contents reverently as if these were the memorabilia of a dead pop star rather than the man she married, the man she still lives with.
Bernard, she thinks, would not recall now which film they saw on their first date, might not even remember that they went to the cinema on that occasion. The young Bernard, lying in a field beside her, turning towards her and holding a cornflower against her cheek, near the blue of her eye, seems almost like a different man, a lover she once had. She keeps him in an envelope in a drawer, that man who admired her calves; that man who, twisting the cornflower between his thumb and his index finger, said, ‘Come away with me.’
