Homecoming

by Susie Steiner

  ‘Holy shit,’ she said, covering her mouth and nose with her coat collar.

  ‘I did warn you,’ Dave said.

  He’d stayed and helped her with the washing-up and switched all the lights on. They had explored the upstairs bedrooms – six of them – each decorated with energetic floral wallpapers and all darkened by their boarded-up windows. Then he’d had to go. His mobile phone had been buzzing insistently. ‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘I’ve got a couple want to complete by the end of the day.’

  And she’d felt a pang of jealousy towards the unknown couple and their presumed happiness.

  ‘I’ll be fine,’ she’d said, standing at the door while Dave descended the front steps in the 4 p.m. February darkness. The minute he’d gone, she searched for her cigarettes and lit one, sitting on a box in the lounge, taking in the room: the television in the corner with the armchair up close to it, its fabric thin on the arms and a greasy dark patch on the back, where a head would lie. There was a large grey-green button-back couch – an antique – with a blanket laid on it; beside it a tiny table with a pair of glasses and a glass of water. Someone had been sleeping in here. Maybe they could no longer manage the stairs. She should have found this creepy but she didn’t.

  For a week she’d lived in the house’s boarded-up half-light, walking to work each day, lying down under the blanket on the sofa each night. Smoking cigarettes. Crying. Looking at old text messages. Remembering him coming into the bedroom in the morning with a coffee for her and then dancing around the bed in his pants while she sat up, squinting into the sun. The queen bee. Remembering meeting him in the freezing street, when she was moving. Not dead, after all. And the shock, new as if it had just happened, that he’d cut her from his life, like a bruise from the flesh of an apple.

  ‘All my love, my kindness, my niceness,’ she’d sobbed on Dave Garside’s toned chest, ‘he’s erased all of it.’

  ‘It’s not that easy to erase someone,’ Dave had said.

  ‘I want him back.’

  ‘I know you do,’ said Dave.

  ‘But he doesn’t want me.’

  ‘No,’ he said, stroking her hair and kissing the top of her head. ‘It doesn’t look like it.’

  She hobbled through her days at work, crying in the toilets, hollow-eyed with customers who could still laugh, shop, talk about films and the couples still together, making their plans. That was the worst of it: couples. Couples moving about freely in their lives. Couples planning holidays. Couples taking joy in the telly and a takeaway, as if there had been a nuclear holocaust outside their window – the grey, charred dereliction that she was living in – but they couldn’t see it because they cheerfully had the curtains drawn. The pain of existence didn’t touch them. And it felt like the only person – the only person in the entire universe who could make it better was him. How could one person be so powerful? How could one person so expertly reverse into her driveway, dump his truckload of steaming horseshit, and then drive off into the night?

  When she wakes, neon strips of day push around the boards that are hammered to the lounge windows. She makes a cup of coffee using some old Nescafé granules she has found in a kitchen cupboard. It is Monday – her day off.

  She has found a copy of the Yellow Pages in a sideboard drawer and she sits over it at the kitchen table, smoking. She looks under ‘W’ for window cleaners and finds ‘A Touch of Glass’. Presses the number into her mobile phone.

  ‘Can you come today?’ she says. ‘Can you come now?’

  He says he can. He’s in the area with his van.

  ‘And can you bring a hammer?’

  ‘A hammer?’ he says.

  ‘Yes, a hammer.’

  ‘I do have a hammer, yes,’ he says, uncertain, ‘in the back of my van.’

  ‘I’ll see you shortly.’

  She pulls the Hoover out from the cupboard under the stairs. It is mustard-yellow with a sagging bag. She plugs it in, in the living room, and pushes it back and forth across the carpet. It makes a good job of pulling at the web of hairs and crumbs until they release their sticky grip and disappear. The Hoover makes stripes across the carpet like a bowling green. There is a knock at the door.

  ‘Come in,’ she says. ‘I want you to take down all the boards and clean all the windows.’

  He is still looking around, taking in the vastness. He carries a bucket filled with different-sized wipers and cloths.

  ‘It’ll cost you,’ he says. ‘It’s a big house.’

  ‘That’s alright,’ she says. ‘It needs doing.’

  ‘Are you supposed to be here? You’re not squatting, are you?’

  ‘No,’ she says. And she dangles the bundle of keys that Dave gave her. ‘I’ve got keys. I haven’t broken in.’

  He levers the boards off one by one and the ground floor of the house fills up, like his orange bucket under the faucet.

  ‘I’ll start on cleaning the downstairs windows now. Do the boards upstairs after,’ he says.

  ‘Right,’ she says.

  When he tramps up the stairs, she tours the ground floor, now flooded with light. Some of the windows she opens, bringing in the roar of air and traffic and some faraway birdsong. The musty air begins to dissipate. She mops the kitchen floor. She takes down the living-room curtains. They puff out clouds of dust. She pushes her armchair into a corner and sets a standard lamp next to it.

  Her industry gathers pace over the next three days – in the slowly lightening evenings after work. In the hallway there is a green door. She opens it and sees a flight of steps disappear down into the dark. She feels for light switches to her right and left and finds them. She descends. The room is wallpapered with ebullient orange flowers. Against the wall is a brand-new washing machine and beside it a brand-new dryer, their plastic still on. They have been plumbed in but never used – someone’s last attempt at independence, too late. Sitting on the surface of one is an open box of detergent. Its powder has coagulated into clumps.

  She washes the curtains. She washes the cushion covers. She washes the linen from the upstairs beds. Load after load. She sets an ironing board up in the living room where she pushes and pulls. Her ironing fills the atmosphere with clouds of warm starch. It pushes away the smell of her cigarettes.

  The sun has arced over the house, back to front, and the evening light shouts low and orange, its shoulder up against the glass. She has picked up one of the books from a shelf in an upper bedroom. It is by someone called Carol Shields. Out of sheer physical weakness – she has run out of strength for more labour – she reads it cover to cover. She reads standing with one elbow on the worktop in the kitchen, her body curved over and one hand supporting her cheek, the other turning the pages. She reads until her back is shot through with pain and her legs ache. She reads in the basement, waiting for the dryer to finish. Mostly, though, she reads in the corner armchair. Everything inside her begins to thaw, as if she has up to now been locked out in sub-zero temperatures. Ruby is overcome with gratitude, both exquisite and painful, of the kind that gives rise to embarrassing letters. Even this is expressed. ‘The sentiment is excessive, blowsy, loose, womanish,’ says Carol. ‘But I am willing to blurt it all out, if only to myself. Blurting is a form of bravery. I’m just catching on to that fact. Arriving late, as always.’ At last, thinks Ruby. Someone at my temperature.

  *

  Primrose is kneeling over Claire’s avocado bathtub as if taking communion. The water forms two walls over her ears. Despite the torrent, her fringe is still dry. The bath plastic is unyielding but less cold than her enamel one at home. Her knees are sore.

  She’s been coming here a fortnight now, hanging out in the egg-yolk-yellow warmth of Claire’s flat. It’s as if she can exhale here, away from the destitution of her own house, where the light is blue and cold; where there are crumbs on the kitchen table and strewn tools; where she and Max avoid each other because the conversation would be too hard and this is their only current means of existence.

 
‘You don’t have to wash it,’ Claire calls from the bedroom. ‘Just wet it.’

  She’s been recuperating, and they’ve not gone anywhere, she and Claire, just cooked meals, watched Corrie and worked on their puzzles. Occasionally, a kind of shock rises within Primrose about the baby and Max’s affair but not often. Primrose is aware she doesn’t have many advantages in life: frizzy hair, a solid body with no discernible waist, that tendency she has to be literal in the understanding of things. But she doesn’t dwell. It’s not in her nature. And now she thinks that might be the greatest gift there is.

  She flicks her head up and ticklish trails of water seep down the back of her neck, between the folds of the towel Claire has placed there. In front of her are brown floral tiles. The light in the room is a dirty forty watts and that fitting could take more, she thinks. She stands up and goes through to Claire’s bedroom.

  The pink floral curtains are drawn and in here, too, there is a low muddy light. Claire pats a stool, set before a dressing table with a three-pane mirror. On the bed is a box with the lid open and in Claire’s hand is a pair of ceramic hair straighteners. She smiles at Primrose and clicks them together, like a crocodile snapping.

  Here in this flat, she can see something new open up. A place to be herself, or at least find out what herself might be. This kind of freedom – it has never occurred to Primrose at all. Life has always appeared to her as something to be stoic about. Without the baby, even though she holds that memory close as her loved secret from an unhappy time, she realises she is free.

  Claire is pulling the hot plates downwards and steam rises and Primrose can smell the human smell of wet hair drying. When the plates have reached the end of the hair, Claire lets it drop. It falls flat against her forehead in a silken curtain. Primrose can’t believe it. She shakes her head to make it swish and tickle the side of her face. Her hair has never had any movement before. It has always sat rigidly on her head like a helmet. She puts a hand up to feel it.

  ‘’S going to look brilliant,’ Claire says.

  March

  — Preparation for lambing —

  ‘What d’ye mean he’s not coming?’ Joe says as the dogs pant and circle about his legs in the yard.

  ‘Says he’s not well,’ says Tal, but he’s avoiding Joe’s eye, he notices, stooping to pat his own dogs as they yap – a criss-crossing, barking mess of black-and-white energy. ‘I’m here to stand in for ’im.’

  ‘Well, you’ve some decent dogs I suppose. I can’t pay you, mind,’ says Joe. ‘This is Max’s work and if he’s sending you in his place, it’ll come out o’ his pocket.’

  ‘Understood Mr Hartle.’

  ‘Ah, call me Joe. We’ve a ten-mile walk ahead of us. Might as well be on terms.’

  They set off out of the gate, the dogs straining ahead and Joe in his flat cap and planting his crook. Tal wears a red anorak. Useful, Joe thinks, to spot him across the purple crags of the mountain.

  They are bringing the last of the pregnant ewes down off the fell to the in-bye, to build them up in their last weeks. Those carrying twins and any that are ailing are already down. Max did that job at least, though he looked as if he’d been dragged behind a quad bike for a mile or two: dishevelled and bloodshot and smelling of old beer sweats. Joe is sorry for him, and at the same time impatient for him to get over it. Neither of them talk about it – they’ve worked instead in a sad silence, Max leaving the farm at the end of each day in a great hurry, as if propelled by something. His need for a drink most likely. And all his late mornings accommodated without comment.

  If only Bartholomew was here to enjoy the lambing. Such a wonderful time. Granted, the early starts were a pain – out at 6 a.m. every day for a month and still checking them on the field after 9 p.m. But there was no better time when it went right.

  Beyond the village, they turn left off the road, through a gate and up into open country where the moss and heather is springy under their boots. They start to tramp the steep incline of the fell, mostly heads down at their wide steps, but occasionally looking up towards the rough grazing and the grey ridge like a spine along the top. Joe loves the fell. There was no arguing with it. He’s not sure if that was an idea of his, or if it’s something his father thought, and drilled into him. Or perhaps he’s just come to an age when he sees it more as his father saw it.

  He looks across at Tal, some two hundred metres away, lost in his own thoughts too, and planting his crook in the ground. Shepherds are always loners. He likes Tal – you’ve no need to make the small talk with him. Joe feels his nose drip in the cold. He sniffs and his Barbour creaks and he hears Tal calling to the dogs, ‘Get back!’

  He’s been as isolated as a shepherd of late. Not that he’s fallen out with Eric, just that he can feel his defences flaring whenever the man’s mentioned or when he sees him at a distance. It’s as if Joe doesn’t want too much contact until he’s brought it good, the farm. Things are too tight for him to be open with a friend that has everything. He wants the chance to bring the lambs in and make some money, and then he can pick up with Eric – stand as his equal and buy him a pint at the club. Not be looked down on.

  Three hours of walking and Joe is out of puff, even though he’s fit for his age – near sixty and still tramping mile upon mile each day across his land, chasing sheep and grabbing them and lifting them onto their hind quarters between his legs. They are reaching the higher ground where the ewes are grazing. He sees them, nipping at the grass, big with pregnancy. They set off at an ungainly run at the sound of the dogs. He and Tal stand by a gate which gives out onto the upper moor, begin their whistles and shouts – ‘Get away!’ – which sends the dogs up the scar and above the sheep to drive them down. Tal is quick. Joe can hear his instructions to the dogs and knows what his plan is. While the dogs work, Joe looks out and takes a breath. The view from up here is magnificent – the slurry colours of the fell, all burnt browns, and then the green fields of the valley and neat walls like stitching.

  ‘Away to me!’ Joe shouts and the dogs crouch low in the heather, eyes all on the flock, ears pricked for Joe’s voice. Once the sheep are grouped and funneled through the gate – only a hundred and twenty or so – then they’ll drive down easy enough, with the odd one straying out to the side which a dog will gather back in.

  Joe’s steps are larger and faster on the descent. Only three weeks till lambing, when the cuckoos will shout daily, the swallows will return and the house martins will be nesting. They’ll come thick and fast, the lambs – every night. Every day, Joe’ll walk the in-bye and see more that have arrived. Or he’ll see a ewe turning, circling, finding her place to labour and he’ll watch till she lies down and births, one then two. Beautiful it is, to see her lick the lamb clean, and then, within half an hour, to see it stand on unsteady legs, staggering, because its every urge is to find the teat. To see that lamb struggle up on its pins can still bring a tear to Joe’s eye. And that first-born will be sucking and sucking, its little tail swishing with the pleasure of it, the strength growing in him by the minute, his black feet like nimble socks. And even while he’s sucking, the mother’ll birth a second on the green field.

  He’ll be walking the in-bye, early and into the evening, with his crook which he uses to push and pull lambs towards the teat they haven’t found yet. He’ll watch the ewes that aren’t laboring right; step in and pull their lambs out if need be; shove a bit of straw up the nostrils to make them sneeze or swing them by their legs or give their ribs a tickle, all to get them breathing right. He’ll watch the ewes that are new to motherhood – make sure they’re letting their lambs suckle, because often they won’t. Often they walk away. And pen them, if needs be, to make her accept her new job. Ones that have done it before, they’re OK. And there’s always the dead ones – to a fox or malnutrition. He must skin those, and pull the fleece onto any lamb that’s orphaned in the hope the mother will accept it as her own.

  Joe is tired now, though the downward tramp is easier and the
fell seems at times to be carrying him down and his sheep run out like milk from a pail. It’s this time, just before lambing, that he begins spinning the numbers, seeing what sticks. There’s four grand to pay in rent next month, the eight grand loan that has all gone to Granville Harris (that sticks in his throat). He’ll need at least 450 mule lambs out good this lambing, otherwise he’s in trouble. Last year, they didn’t make more than thirteen thousand pounds profit and that was before any salaries were taken. And this year, well they’ll be worse off because of that fire and the price of feed being what it was. So the odd prize tup wouldn’t go amiss. A good one – a ram that got you rosettes at a show – could fetch anything from a few hundred to several thousand in the bidding.

  ‘Joe? Joe, there’s one getting past ye,’ Tal is shouting to him and Joe realises he’s descended the fell without noticing, his dogs working and his calls coming out of him without his mind on it. Five hours, it’s taken them.

  ‘Sorry, Tal,’ he says, ‘I were miles away.’ And his dogs pull in the stray ewe. They are back in the valley now, just outside Marpleton. They must drive the flock across the village green to the fields beside the farmhouse.

  ‘That’s a good job, Tal,’ Joe says once they are back in the yard. ‘Will ye join me for a brew and something to eat?’

  ‘No, you’re alright,’ says Tal. ‘I’d best be off.’

  *

  ‘Primrose?’ calls Ann, peering around the open back door of her and Max’s house. She checks her watch. 5.30 p.m. She should be back from the Co-op by now. The light is fading, the March wind bitter. Ann has steeled herself to come here and the view of the empty stairwell almost gives her licence to drive back home but instead she steps backwards and turns to cross the yard. She must be somewhere, with the door open like that, tending the chickens or feeding the pigs. I’ll find her, and then no one can sayI didn’t do my duty.