Turning for Home

by Barney Norris

  The congregation is so diminished that Grandad doesn’t even hire caterers any more. This year Aunt Laura will do all the cooking, and people will eat from paper plates, which makes it easier to clean up. I don’t really know how Aunt Laura will manage so much work, but she did it all with Grandma the last seven or eight years since the caterers stopped coming, and perhaps she wants to carry on on her own because she feels no one can replace her sister at her side, not just yet. Grandad told me last night that Aunt Laura started preparing everything a week ago, to give herself time to get everything ready for the day. He talked about her like she was something from a myth, said she would battle the day with no weapon but the sweat of her brow, regal, defiant, as terrifying as any general. She would make a cold lunch for everyone, because that made timing things easier than hot food. And no matter what troubles beset her, she would surely come through. In the years ahead, I suppose it will only get easier for her to carry on doing things like that, as the tribe my grandad sprang from continues to thin, and fewer and fewer people make it to the party.

  All the same, it’s still a significant occasion, this day. Once the sky’s turned ripe with the fresh fullness of the sun in May, and the morning’s in full swing, the lawn will fill with bodies, pressed a little closer together than they might have chosen if the party wasn’t happening so early in the spring and the weather was warmer, and the air will hum with years-old conversations, picked up again for the duration of an afternoon.

  Today is the first time I’ve come here in three years. Because I was in hospital, some of that time, and because I was trying to keep a distance between me and Mum. And, now I think about all of it, I’m afraid. I’m dreading the day, even though I slept better than I expected.

  I lie on the bed and carry on staring at the wall, thinking of all the things that might happen this afternoon. I’m scared of how different everything might seem, how much everyone’s lives might have moved on after three years. I don’t know whether I’ll feel much connection to any of those people, my relations, any more. I don’t know what they might all have been told about me since I last saw them, what they might be thinking about me behind my back, and what they might think of the way I look. I wish with all my heart that I could go back in time and spend today at the party I went to four years ago. Or go back to any of the other years that are gone. Things seemed possible then. Things used to seem easy.

  I say a last goodbye to the thought of going to sleep again now my mind’s whirring, and try to steel myself for sitting upright and beginning. I let the grogginess slide away, and I feel as ready as I’m ever going to. In the bathroom I turn on the shower. It’s always strange to undress in someone else’s house, even a house that’s familiar to you, even your grandparents’. I stand naked in front of the mirror and force myself to look at my reflection, then run my hand down the side of my body, over my breast, my stomach, my hip.

  Every morning while I wait for the water to run hot, I stand like this and watch my body in the mirror. I remember a time not so many years ago, after my twentieth birthday, when it seemed to me that the person I was had somehow set, become fixed, become inevitable. A childhood of possibility had passed, and I decided I was comfortable with the idea that this was my face, and this was my body, and this was the life I was going to live. I felt happy enough with the skin I was in, back then. I live in hope of feeling like that again some day. When I was younger, before the accident, I never knew how precious it was to be at peace with yourself, and let yourself be loved. For a while, till the accident changed everything, I felt that way. I stopped playing the game of imagining other lives laid over my own, the teenage game of dreaming your life. Now I look at myself and I know that stability was just an illusion. Now the sight of my body in the mirror makes me feel sick. I never really stopped pretending to be other people, I don’t think. I just got better at it, so I hardly noticed what was happening any more as I slipped out of one skin and into another, minute by minute, whoever I talked to, whatever I was thinking.

  No matter how hard I look at my reflection, at the other self I only ever meet when the two of us stand either side of this mirror, I can never believe a stranger would be able to tell even a single one of my secrets or stories from looking at me. It’s strange that the body can hold so much, and still seem so unreadable.

  Some people never recover from learning that there is no world on the other side of the mirror, I don’t think. No Narnia, no Wonderland, and none of the world of your dreams coming true just by wishing, by walking through a mirror or falling down a rabbit hole. Some people never get over the fact that all those longings we carry within us have to be willed into being if we ever want to really see them come true. I don’t know whether I’ve properly got over that myself.

  I get into the shower and flinch as the water hits my back. It’s much hotter than the shower at home. It makes me smile. People say money can’t buy happiness. But it pays for better boilers; it wakes you up faster in the mornings.

  Downstairs, I find Grandad in the breakfast room, staring out of the window with the light washing pale over his face, the remains of a boiled egg on a plate in front of him, the smell of burnt toast and butter like a memory in the room. He turns and smiles when he hears me come in.

  ‘Good morning. How did you sleep?’

  I smile back at him. ‘Really well, thanks. You?’

  ‘Oh, I slept all right.’

  ‘Are you looking forward to today?’

  Grandad laughs to himself, as if the idea of today being something to look forward to seems unimaginable to him. ‘I suppose so.’

  ‘Oh my God – happy birthday! Sorry! I should have started with that.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  A strain of the dream I had last night comes back to me suddenly. A cliff pocked with caves where a town on the clifftop hid away all their children, who survived there, and grew up believing they were birds, not men and women, and learned to sing and fly through the heartstopping air like the crows that nested in the dark places of the cliffs hung all around them. And I remembered a dream the night before that of broken men sat cowed, slobbering and naked inside gauze cages, kept apart from visitors by ropes and string under low ceilings, no light anywhere, forgotten and unwashed.

  ‘I might have some cereal,’ I say.

  ‘Help yourself. There’s lots in the pantry.’

  ‘OK.’ I go through to the pantry on the other side of the kitchen, and open the door, and breathe in the memory-rich aroma of the dark, cool room. I’ve always loved it in here: the smell of shortbread and marmalade, tins and caddies stacked high over my head like a cave of wonders, shelves closing round me like an embrace. It’s dark and womblike and anything I reach out and touch is a treasure: delicious, brightly packaged, wrapped up like secrets. When I was very small, the walls of food seemed to stretch on up above my head for ever. I look at the shelves now, a little more thinly stocked without Grandma to keep an eye on them, the larder of a cook with a little less imagination.

  Last night Grandad cooked for us. A lentil stew and treacle pudding. ‘The sort of thing you used to have when you came to stay in the holidays, Kate. I hope that’s all right.’

  ‘That’ll be lovely. Thank you, Grandad.’

  When dinner was served, I could see it was all from tins. There would be no more of the rich smell of Grandma’s favourite recipes drifting through these rooms; he didn’t know how to make them. On the shelves I see stacks of corned beef and jars of pickled vegetables instead, waiting to be ladled out on to one plate after another. Something else is missing now as well. It’s as if there’s no magic to the shelves any more, no splendour lingering. Is that because Grandad doesn’t keep the larder as well stocked as it used to be, or is it me seeing things differently?

  When I was a little girl I used to try and see how long I could hold my breath underwater. One time, swimming in an outdoor pool, I lay like a crocodile against the concrete belly of the deep end, daylight dappling gent
ly on my shoulders, tiger-striped, and kept myself down there till my head began to hurt, till the very last moment I could bear to keep waiting. When I felt my lungs start to burn I pushed back up towards the light, but found to my horror that there was a lilo looming above me. Instead of getting to the surface and gulping at the air, my hands met the cloying plastic of the sun lounger, and I thought for a moment of pure panic that I was going to drown beneath it, disappear completely and for ever.

  That’s what it’s felt like to battle through any given day for a long time, all my life passing and all of it filled with the same desperation. The memory of clawing at that heavy plastic as my blood started to sing in my veins, my blood screaming out that my lungs were bursting, comes to me time and again these days.

  I look around for cereal. All I can see is All-Bran, so I take the packet back into the kitchen and pour out a bowlful, measuring as carefully as I can without the proper equipment. I’ve been trying to go vegan for the last few weeks, but of course there’s no soya milk or almond milk or anything else like that here; those are the discoveries of another generation. I wonder how I’m even going to be able to stay vegetarian today, if Grandad has any say in the food. He believes a meal hasn’t really happened if it doesn’t contain meat. I did think of mentioning it to him before I arrived, but decided against it, because he would have worried, and prepared something specially, and I didn’t want the attention; it’s easier to get on with my own problems without anyone watching how I deal with them.

  Grandad looks up when I walk back into the breakfast room, and seems surprised at first, then smiles. ‘Find what you wanted?’

  My stomach tightens, and I don’t know how to answer, but he doesn’t know he’s asked the wrong question. His hands lie flat on the table, either side of his plate and placed very deliberately, as if he’s been examining them. ‘Yes, thanks.’

  He nods, and looks away from me. I want to get him talking, because the silences at this table used to stretch out like cats in the sun when I was younger, if it was just Grandad and me, and everyone else had gone out. The memory of how frightened of Grandad I used to be, his fierce and distant frowning, lost in some newspaper or briefing note, still disturbs me. Besides, he won’t want to sit in silence either, probably. I’m here to cheer him up a bit, to distract him from thinking of Grandma.

  ‘You seem a bit preoccupied, if you don’t mind me saying.’

  ‘Oh, well.’ He looks back out to the garden, and I don’t think he’s going to say any more. I wonder whether he really wants me here right now, or whether he had in fact been enjoying this breath of time alone before the business and busyness of the day began. I sit down opposite him, feeling awkward. Then he turns to look at me again. ‘I heard you in the hall and for a moment I didn’t quite know who was going to come in.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ I search his face, worried that something is wrong. It’s always my instinct now to reach at once for the worst thing that could possibly be happening. I wonder whether he’s had a stroke. His face hasn’t dropped. Has his mind somehow slipped? What’s happening?

  ‘I suppose I thought it might be your grandma. Isn’t that silly?’ He smiles at me, and rolls his eyes, and it’s the same face he used to pull to make me laugh when I was six years old, and I can’t help smiling, even though what he said worries me. I see with sudden clarity how alone he is now, rattling round this house, listening for an echo of Grandma, drowning in the silence she left behind. It’s cruel that people have so much taken from them as they near the end. Not that Grandad is even very old, that’s the worst of it – he might even have to get through another twenty years with no one to share the day with.

  His smile fades again, and he looks down at his hands where they lie very still on the table. Is he afraid of becoming upset, is that why he doesn’t want to look at me? I know that’s when I have to look away from other people. Or perhaps he laid his hands out like that to stop them shaking, and is looking now to see whether they’re giving him away.

  ‘I’m sorry. You must think I’m going mad in my old age.’

  ‘Of course I don’t.’ I think he’s looking very old though, much older than I remember from last time I saw him, and that’s a strange thing, because he seemed so strong to me once, so proud and frightening.

  But that’s what happens, in the end: people get older; their time ticks down. Grandad had a heart scare five years back, when Grandma was still alive. We all thought then that it would be him who went first, and not the other way round. In truth, it was a relatively mild heart attack. He never lost consciousness as far as anyone knew, and they kept him in hospital for two weeks, and gave him angiograms and ECGs, and talked to him about lifestyle and taking things slow, but then he was allowed home and life went on much as it had done before, with a little extra medication.

  They looked for genetic reasons, and it emerged there was one waiting inside him. He was diagnosed with hypertrophic cardiomyopathy, a thickening of the walls of the heart that meant the muscles had to beat harder, which could create strains and risks over time. At first there was talk of giving him a pacemaker to safeguard against another collapse, but in the end they decided they didn’t need to, not yet.

  As the problem was an inherited condition, Mum and I had to get checked out for it too, and I was asked to lie on hospital beds with the ultrascanner pressed painfully into my ribs while a nurse looked things over. I felt ill knowing as I lay there on my side that if I only turned over to face the other way, I would be able to see a film of my own heart beating, the engine that drove me, the muscle that would one day relax for the last time and bring me to a conclusion. I could watch the thing very gradually running out of beats. I hope I’ll never have to see a picture of it. It would be terrifying. I think watching your own heart beat would be like meeting your doppelgänger. I think it might kill you. Make the world end.

  Neither Mum nor I were diagnosed with the condition. But we were told it could develop later in life; we were not safe from it, we might suddenly hear its voice calling us years from now, and so we would need to get ourselves checked every five years or so. The time’s approaching, I suppose, when I’ll need to get another check-up.

  Does everyone wish in the same way I do that we could hold on to more of our lives as they happen to us? I think it’s a weakness in me, but maybe it’s the whole world’s instinct. I’d rather not feel as if I’m always losing the day around me. I want desperately to be able to think of life as a kind of travelling: a landscape we cross like explorers over sand dunes, seeming bright to us at first but then vanishing into the distant dark behind us. It would make everything so much easier if I could be happy with that, think of time as an adventure. It’s just that the idea is terrifying to me, and it scares me to think that everything I’ve lived through has gone for ever.

  Grandad pushes his chair back from the table. ‘I might get some more tea. Do you want a tea, a cup of coffee?’

  ‘Coffee would be lovely, if that’s all right?’

  ‘Of course.’ He gets up and leaves the room, and I plough into my All-Bran. It’s the worst cereal in the world, the roughage you might feed to horses, but it’s all that’s going and I will get through it, no matter what. I chew on my cereal and count the number of times I chew, trying to do things properly, and stare at the wall, and once again see things I left behind miles in the past.

  A long time ago they used to pin my paintings to the fridge in the kitchen next door. All gone now, of course. Grandma used to tell a story about my painting and drawing. She said when I was very small I used to love drawing, but I never drew anything in particular. Just different colours and different lines. Then when I was about a year old Grandma took me to some kind of check-up for first-time mothers, and Mum was busy. She went back to work very soon after I was born because she said she was going crazy in the house all day, then complained about having done so and missed out on my childhood for the next twenty years. The health visitor asked whether I was being
encouraged to draw things. Grandma told her that I loved drawing, so the health visitor asked whether I could draw a house. Grandma said she didn’t know. The health visitor said I should be able to draw a house by now, and asked me to have a go. So I took the crayon I was offered, and drew a box with other little boxes inside it that might have been windows, and might have been a door. And that was the end of making up shapes for myself.

  ‘Here we are. Proper coffee.’ Grandad comes back into the room with a cafetière and a mug for me and another mug of tea for himself on a tray.

  ‘Thanks so much.’

  I watch as the steam of the coffee rises up through the light coming in through the window. Grandma used to wait for three minutes exactly before she poured her coffee out of this very cafetière. That way it was easier to press down the plunger. I remember her standing in the kitchen, watching the second hand ticking round, Woman’s Hour faint in the background and the smell of the brewing coffee rich in the room.

  It’s a perfect morning. It’s turning into the most beautiful spring. The garden is filled with expectation. There’s something about the light on the grass that seems unreal, the whole view of the lawn from the window softened so it takes on the quality of a painting, inflected like a canvas to say something more than the sum of its parts. The view through the window is as vivid as a feeling. It reminds me of the way brick buildings seem to be suffused with a new colour at the end of the day, a life of their own, and almost glow. There are colours in the world which happen for only a few moments in a day, a year even. Dawn breaking over Stonehenge on a midsummer morning, light aligning with Purbeck stone for a secret, dancing moment. Once they vanish, you can’t bring those moments back into being. The only way to drink them in is to watch the world more closely than anyone else, and gather up secrets, and learn how to look.

  Spring is the most exciting season. The daffodils shine in the sun. You can stare at one, and it will seem to become more beautiful every moment you watch, until you can hardly bear to look at it.