by Morag Joss
Glasgow. Suddenly it sounds again as it did years ago, when it meant the same as dark, alarming, noisy. When I’m small, in the holidays when she has no choice but to take me, I go, too, on the train from Burnhead to Glasgow Central. She always tries to find a compartment that is empty, but even when she does I am not allowed to sprawl beyond the confines of my place. I want desperately to rub the insides of my arms and the backs of my legs all over the velvety seats. I have a memory of Glasgow afternoons filled with coal smoke and car exhaust, the squeal of bus brakes and the rustle of tissue paper and the silent opulence of dress shops and new clothes. From the ladies who bring things to the fitting room I sense a kind of approval towards my mother that extends to me, sitting outside the door on a chair dangling my legs, and although I do not ask, I always wonder why these ladies, who are clearly our friends, never come to our house. And I see a sort of dream of Fenwicks, the revolving door from the street landing us in the shining Perfumery and Cosmetics, hard and dazzling with mirrors and lights reflecting thousands of myself, when I feel quite awkward enough about being just the single me. The enamelled-looking ladies trailing their bright, pepper and powder scents between the glass counters are less friendly than the clothes shop assistants; I feel like a black stone tossed into a pool of crystals. We stop halfway through the afternoon and my mother has tea and I have ice cream in a freezing metal dish with a wafer. The ice cream has chips of real ice in it and for years I will think this is the sign of superior ice cream, chunks of ice big enough to creak when you bite into them, because from my mother’s face I can tell the place we are in is superior. I also know that I am tagging along and not the point of the outing but I love the high decorated ceiling and the swift black and white waitresses carrying tongs and cake-stands, notepads hanging from their belts. I don’t think these afternoons are planned. I think my mother acts on sudden impulse. There is always a numbness on the journey home, certainly.
I wonder if it’s gone now, Fenwicks. If it is still there it’ll seem ordinary now. It’s Glasgow.
On the other hand they’ll think black leather trousers at a funeral—black leather trousers anywhere on a woman my age, no matter how long her legs—are outrageous, and that in itself is enough to tempt me.
I suppose it’s not really about the tights.
2
On the first day of the holidays, Lila stood at the dining room window of 5 Seaview Villas and realised that the colours of the days of the week had tiptoed from her mind, leaving it bare. It was raining, the day was Monday, and that was all. Monday is pale green and unripe. Tuesday is beige, Wednesday is white. Maybe it was the telling of it that had chased the colours away; writing it down in an Ink Composition had revealed how stupid a habit it was. She was glad to be rid of it, she supposed, though the space left behind seemed to need filling with something else; the colours had simply fallen from the words leaving eight weeks stretching ahead in a cycle of monochrome days, passing and returning. Already she was so heartsick with the repetition she could not move. She hoped Enid would come. She didn’t really want to see her, but if she came they might wander into Burnhead and then she could suggest going to see Enid’s mum.
She was also rooted by the noise. Her mother, still in her dressing gown and singing along in the title role with Maria Callas, was playing her records of Turandot in the music room across the hall. She had turned the volume right up and through the squalling of the orchestra and competing voices came the fuzzy metal spit of the amplifier; blurted explosions of sound hit the air like handfuls of nails hurled at a window. Every few seconds the space over Lila’s head cracked with a noise like snapping bones. Yet she stood quite still; it seemed slightly less risky. Her mother’s voice, blaring through the walls and eddying round her like hot fumes, made her feel so flimsy and insubstantial she was afraid she might be whipped up and scattered like dust in its slipstream. She could not hear herself breathe. If she were to speak, her words would be drowned. Suppose she were tempted to sing herself, to slide a single note of her own into the roar, the sound would be lost.
Yet the day had started well. The post had dropped through the door with its usual tired flip but there had been a letter bearing the words ‘Official Notification’ with the news that one of their Premium Bonds had come up. Not before time, her mother said, opening it and then dropping the envelope on the floor with a cry. She made a series of little jumps along the hall in her mint green nylon dressing gown, playful with self-congratulation. Oh! Oh! Oh! Oh, look! Look! The sound brought Lila out of the kitchen with the kettle in her hand, and Raymond clattering down the stairs. They had no idea how to behave in an unleashing of glee. Slowly, they began to see it was safe to be happy.
The bond had come up not with the usual £25 but spectacularly, with £500, a sum you never heard of anyone you knew getting, a sum that would get your photo and a caption in the Burnhead & District Advertiser. Suddenly they were a proper family, no longer odd and fractious and easily dismayed. They were people to whom a good thing not only had happened but ought to have happened; with Fleur as recipient it felt less random than deserved, somehow. From now on they would wear the lustre of prosperity and luck. Fleur flitted about making toast, insisting they all sit down to breakfast in the dining room as if this was how life would be from now on. No more short-tempered, solitary foraging for breakfast eaten off the draining board. At the table Lila, cautiously elated, poured out her cornflakes and watched her parents.
‘At last!’ Fleur said. ‘Oh, at last we won’t look silly anymore, having a garage and no car. We’ll have a car! A new car!’
Lila could see it already, her mother in calfskin driving gloves and ladies’ slip-on driving shoes, happy.
‘Once I’ve learned to drive, I’ll be able to take the car anywhere I like!’
Lila’s mind sailed on. Enid’s mum had no car. Enid’s mum ran the remnant shop on Main Street and did dressmaking and alterations and she and Enid lived in a cramped flat above. Lila was ashamed of how much she loved Enid’s mum. Sometimes she ached all day to see her. She suspected, especially since last Easter when Enid had taken up with the Lord and the Fellowship of Sinai, that she only stayed friends with Enid because of her, and that Enid suspected it too. When she suggested going along to Sew Right after school and Enid gave her a hard look and said, What for? she was afraid that Enid knew exactly what for. Then she would have to pretend she didn’t care and drift home to 5 Seaview Villas, aching all the more.
Maybe when the car came she would be safe from that. Oh, I nearly forgot to mention it, she would tell them both in the back shop, in a careful floating voice, we’re getting a car. Surely when she and Fleur were out together on lovely mother and daughter excursions she would have no more need of the back shop. She would not crave the smells of cloth and paraffin and biscuits, the sight of Mrs Foley’s round, slow body and the click of the sewing machine like an oiled tongue lapping up the fabric as her big hands fed it under the needle. I won’t be able to come round after school so much, I’m afraid, she would say. My mum and me, we’ll be off out.
Yes, they’d be off places, and she would never again have to worry about how much she wished that Enid’s mother were hers instead.
Her father finished chewing. ‘Och, Fleur,’ he said, shaking his head, ‘just you hold your horses a minute. A car’s a major expense.’
‘Oh, come on!’ Fleur cried, her eyes still shining. ‘Now we can afford it.’
‘Aye,’ he sighed, ‘we could maybe buy it. But we couldn’t run it.’
‘Oh, for God’s sake, Raymond, of course we could!’ She picked up the letter and waved it at him. ‘Look! Five hundred! What’s the point of having a garage and no car? You said we’d get a car.’
‘Aye, one day. I never said when. We’re still paying off the stereogram.’
Fleur’s mouth twisted. Lila, recognising dangerous ground, stood up and began stacking the plates. Her father did not believe in hire purchase so her mother had bought the Dec
ca stereogram—glide-away doors, dark walnut finish, three speakers, four-speed auto-changer—by forging his signature on the forms and on the cheque for the down payment. It had cost 95 guineas and the instalments would go on for another three and a half years.
‘That’s just typical of you. What’s that got to do with it? I suppose you think I should sit in this dump with nothing decent to play records on?’
Raymond said, ‘Och, Fleur, I’m just saying—’
‘If it was up to you we’d never buy a thing. Don’t be such a bloody wet blanket, we need a car. Of course we should get it now, stuck out here! With a garage and no car!’
‘I’m just saying…There’s purchase tax, don’t forget. That bumps it up.’
‘We’ve got five hundred!’
‘There’s the servicing.’
‘Oh, typical. You’re so mean. You’re a mean bastard!’
‘Fleur! There is no call…’
‘Oh, for God’s sake, Raymond!’
‘Well, it’s a fact. And there’s insurance, and have you any notion what petrol costs? And you’ve to take into account,’ he said mournfully, ‘depreciation. You never get your money back on a car. We’d be better seeing to the damp.’
There was a tight moment of silence.
‘You mean bastard! You bastard!’
Lila stepped swiftly out of the way. Fleur stormed out with a scream about the Last Bloody Straw, trapping a wad of mint green nylon in the door. It muffled the slam and ruined the exit. She screamed again and yanked the material after her, ripping it. Lila sat down again and waited while her cornflakes sank in the milk and collapsed into saturated orange scabs. The music room door slammed, Turandot started, and her father went to work.
Lila had watched him cycle past the window and over the bridge towards Burnhead, his pumping feet appearing and disappearing from under his grey plastic cycling cape. Then, bludgeoned by the noise and surrendering herself to a trance of loathing for the wet view, she did not move from the window. Afternoon shadow would crawl into the room and displace the morning’s, and she would not move. She did not wonder if from the room across the hall her mother was staring at the same view and escaping into a trance of her own. The rain dripped down. Monday is pale green and unripe. Tuesday is beige, Wednesday is white. But they weren’t; the days were insubstantial, colourless, nothing more than shadows burning dimly in emptiness, putting out no heat. She felt trapped and erased, and could not move. She would fall away into ash, probably, in the end.
my first thought is just to get people in. Just get a couple of men in and tell them to get rid of the lot; there are firms that do such things. But when I call the solicitor to get the name of somebody who will take it on for me, it turns out I can’t. I find that the solicitor requires me to go through ‘the deceased’s effects’, something to do with valuation and tax, and now there’s more. They ask me if the death has been registered. I have to call the bank, they need the numbers of his accounts and any cards which somehow I have to find, why haven’t they got them? And the undertaker suggests I may care to look out a set of clothes for him unless I want him sent off in the pyjamas he was wearing or wrapped in a polyester shroud. They all need copies of the death certificate.
I have to find things. I have to think. I have to organise. I am unnerved, because these are tasks for which I am not equipped and have no aptitude: tasks requiring at the very least completed forms, lists, decisions and in all probability also buckets and bin bags and rubber gloves. Now I realise that with him gone I was imagining this place already empty of anything important. Not that I think that things left behind spill spontaneously out of houses and dispose of themselves, but I am not prepared for discovering significance in the clutter. It’s surprising, like raking over a rubbish dump and finding it full of things I want. I’m not talking about discovering treasure. It’s the cheap, broken, dirty things—his disposable razor, a comb with oily strands of hair coiled in it, a tin opener sticky with the dark glue of canned foods, objects I don’t recognise and never watched him use—that lie in wait and assault me, because I see them in his hands. I see the daily pickings-up and placings-down of objects by those hands, everyday tasks filling year after year and becoming in themselves the main point, the last of his pride residing in such lonely skills as shaving himself unaided or opening a small tin of baked beans. As Christine says, he was still managing fine.
The picture I have of his hands comes from childhood. They are huge, safe paddles, warm and oddly veined and three times bigger than mine. Which brings me to the problem of his body. I have no intention of seeing it; I want to think it’s just a container of no further use, of no more interest than an empty eggshell. But I want to see his hands. I must see his hands one last time, so that’s another bloody thing I have to arrange.
I brace myself to get on, to concentrate on the surfaces, and I decide to begin with the topmost layer, the room he lived in: taking down the signs of his routines, assessing the objects he touched four days ago, disturbing the last air he breathed. But all I see is how immutable his things are and how eloquent, on the subject of his loneliness and my neglect. His ‘effects’ exude the silent loyalty of a bereaved dog; there is something stubborn in their failure to reflect that the life they belonged to is over. A Radio Times lies on the edge of the hearth by the armchair, folded over to last Wednesday where Countdown is ringed in a shaky, ragged circle. The armchair is like an animal’s bed, layered and bumpy with extra rugs and cushions, as squashed and favourite as a nest lined with scraps. It still harbours the crumbs he let fall, still waits for his backside and thighs to hover and fold and collapse into the two channels in the seat. Everywhere, on chair arms and light switches and door handles, there’s a waxy patina of grey, the pewtery shine of gentle fingers depositing their oil so imperceptibly there is something sinister in it.
I have not yet dared open a cupboard or a drawer. I start with the sideboard, expecting its shelves to harbour sauce bottles stuck onto spilt syrupy rings, and I am amazed to find instead row upon row of smooth glass paperweights with chips of coloured glass trapped inside that look like petrified anemones or bunches of tight stone flowers. There must be over thirty, each one different, each placed on tissue paper. He never deliberately collected anything, nor was his life prone to the incidental accretion of cherishable objects. I want to ask him where they came from, and why, when dirt became invisible to him elsewhere, he has not let it touch these. I see his hands again, turning each glass sphere in warm soapy water and drying it, holding it up to the window to catch the unchanging colours, placing it on fresh paper. Small rays of a simple, ritual happiness in taking care of them still shine from their surfaces. I tell myself that he would like them set aside and kept apart from the grime elsewhere in the house. In death, he is full of preferences and reasons; in guilt, I am full of consideration for them.
And so, I go up to the attic to see if there is an empty box up there for the paperweights, and now I have got myself into something. There are no boxes, at least not empty ones. There are boxes and tea chests, full mostly of papers thrown in anyhow and spilling over the edges, with shadows of dust sloping into their depths like a powdering of charcoal over white hillsides. There are scrunched-up piles of cloth on the floor, heaps of unrecognisable shapes wrapped in newspaper and pushed in one corner next to suitcases; there are dust-sheets, a yellow-grey glacier of newspapers in a slow slide against the wall, a row of jars. A thousand doomed mending jobs flung through the barely opened door have landed across the camp bed or have missed it and hit the floor: bits of lamps, a bag of old plugs, coils of flex ending in wire tongues, chair legs, wallpaper, linoleum off-cuts, picture frames with broken glass, an open box full of tools fused together under a coat of rust like handfuls of sifted sand. Standing up here under the attic skylight at the back of the house, I realise I can hear the sea, and then everything in the room seems to have come from there, thrown up in great freak waves and deposited to rot: the washed-up relics, ru
ined and stranded after the tide.
I turn to go back downstairs but I know I can’t. I can’t go on clearing out his sideboard, emptying his fridge, sorting his clothes, with all this waiting above. I tell myself it makes sense to change the plan, to start here at the top of the house and in the scene of greatest chaos and decay, but that’s not it. It’s the sight of the camp bed and a glimpse of the papers stuffed into the tea chests that make me admit that this is what was waiting all along.
And maybe it should, but it does not surprise me that stuff from the Turandot summer is still here, though it doesn’t look deliberately kept, and certainly can’t have been cherished. On the morning after that unforgettable first night it must have been unbearable for him to see it: cuttings and scraps of paper and lists and sheets of music and props and bits of costume and the rest of it all over the empty house, so I guess he bundled it up and just stuffed it up here, maybe for my mother to collect later, which of course she never did. It doesn’t look as if anyone has touched any of it since. I wonder if he forgot about it. I can only hope so.
I bring the tea chests down, scratching my shins on the way, and start them in no particular order—my eye caught first, I suppose, by the cutting from the Burnhead & District Advertiser on the top of one of them.
3
It was Wednesday and Turandot still raged from the music room. Fleur’s voice had deteriorated to a rasp and now she was singing along with Callas only in short bursts. It seemed to Lila that everything sung by one person to another in an opera was a complaint of some kind—too heartless, too cruel, too jealous, too beautiful, too young to die—and also a waste of breath. It was all supposed to be about love. But wasn’t it obvious that nothing would be settled before there was blood on the floor?
