Tideline

by Penny Hancock

  When we returned to the River House, five years ago, the furniture was covered in dust sheets. My mother believes in preserving things. She folds clothes into suitcases for the winter, interleaved with layers of tissue paper. It’s from my mother that I inherited the tradition of marmalade making, conserving, pickling. I always felt those dust sheets, however, were less a way of protecting her furniture, than a sign of her hidden reluctance to pass the house on to me.

  Inheriting the house at my father’s behest seemed like a blessing. But no blessing comes without its cost. My mother needs me near her now, to fetch and carry, to listen and endure. But she never really wanted me in her house, as she’s at pains to remind me.

  It’s not quite light when I wake the next morning. There’s the phut phut phut of a launch on the river. I want to lie here and cherish this feeling. A kind of fullness. A completion. It’s like the night after you give birth and stare at the baby you have brought into the world. It’s like the moment you know you both feel the same towards each other. Made more precious, now you know how rare these instances are.

  I hear footsteps along the alley as the first stallholders hurry towards the market. Soft grey light seeps round the edges of the curtains. I go to the window, pull them back. Outside, the tall buildings on Canary Wharf are pale, the glass walls reflect the pearly sky that gives way to a peach glow where the sun rises beyond Blackwall. It’s very cold out there.

  The smell from the river is sharp, that rich oily mud stench which means the tide is out. Its swag will be on show. New deliveries will lie exposed on the shore: caskets, tyres, bicycle wheels. I know its regular imports, but there’ll be the unexpected, too. However, I have no time for beachcombing this morning. I pull on my kimono and go to look at him.

  His face is paler in the early light of the music room and for a split second, I’m gripped by a fear that I may have overdone it. He mentioned asthma. Alcohol, I once read, can bring on an attack. I bend closer, feel with relief his breath upon my cheek.

  He doesn’t stir, so I pick up one of his hands. Observe the slender fingers, nails long enough to pluck the guitar. One has caught on something and is torn slightly. Pink skin on the pads of his fingers like a child’s. No coarse dark hair on the back of his hands, just a few golden filigree threads which catch the light. On his forearm a raised blue vein. I run my finger along it, watching the rise and fall of the blood as I push. Seb’s arm had this same vein, most prominent when he was exerting strength, as he grasped a painter that he’d thrown around a mooring ring. As he hauled himself up the pilings. Or as his iron grip closed around my wrists.

  I drop Jez’s arm and look at his face. He must have inherited his pale-brown skin from his French Algerian father. A square chin, turned up slightly, the stubble so soft, so slight, a faint dusting of black specks beneath his skin. As I drag my lips over it I can barely feel it. I’m back with Seb. My nose, buried into his neck, smells the combination of smoke and male perspiration for the first time. Feels the ridges and valleys of his body through his shirt.

  When I’ve had my fill, I must continue as normal. My mother’s expecting her Saturday morning visit and will become difficult if I miss it. If I go now, I can be back here before Jez wakes. He’s in a deep sleep and, if I know anything about teenagers, will stay that way for most of the morning. I gaze at him for another minute as he turns, resettles himself. Then, reluctantly, I slip away.

  Outside, the early morning sun is bright, though the air’s so cold it burns my throat as I breathe. Frost glints on the alley walls and I feel the crunch of ice underfoot. Residue from the tide that must have been so high in the night it came over the footpath.

  Only a week ago there was still snow on the ground. I caught a glimpse through the almshouse railings – a cluster of snowdrops that had come through a small circle of grass where the snow had melted. The brilliant white of their bowed heads against the unexpected green took my breath away and I hurried home to find my camera. By the time I came out again the light had gone and the next day the snow had turned to slush. I was afraid the loss of that image would pluck at my brain. It’s something I’ve got to guard against. Regrets burrowing in and feeding off me.

  My mother’s retirement home is a ten minute bus ride away. She moved here when she could no longer manage the River House, when her mind started to slip, her body to give up on her. I hurry down the softly carpeted corridor trying not to inhale the mix of cooking aromas from the separate flats. Max, who visits his own mother and has become a kind of friend, appears from number 10. He waves a cheery good morning so I wave back. I sometimes wonder if Max thinks I’m single and would like to get to know me better. In some ways it’d be fun to flirt, but I have Greg. My husband. Whatever that word means.

  ‘I brought you your paper, and some gin.’ I hand my mother a bag that also contains the incontinence pads I buy for her. It is a matter of delicacy that we never refer to these.

  I press my lips briefly against her dandelion-fluff hair. That I should have to bend to kiss my own mother upsets me, this once capable woman who stood half a head taller than I do. She doesn’t greet me when I step inside her flat, but turns her back to me and asks if I’ll have coffee. Then she starts on about the other residents.

  ‘They’ve started a film club in the lounge. But the things they choose. Such rubbish.’

  ‘Why don’t you make a suggestion yourself?’

  ‘They wouldn’t listen. I know, from the TV they prefer. They’d rather watch ballroom dancing than a decent drama.’

  ‘What about Oliver? He seems pleasant.’

  ‘Oh, he’s an old bore and so effeminate.’

  I think that if she met a new man to share her life with, my mother might become more forgiving. That we might talk more as I imagine other mothers and daughters talk.

  I settle into one of her chintz armchairs and let the sunlight from her French windows warm my lap, thaw my frozen lips. Mother works her way towards the sideboard where she’s set out cups and saucers and a coffee percolator, one shrunken hand on the sofa back, the other against the wall to steady herself.

  ‘It’s early. You can’t have had breakfast. I’ve coffee but nothing else to offer you. Unless you want grape nuts. But I know you sneer at grape nuts.’

  ‘I’m fine, thank you. I’ll pick up something on my way home.’

  ‘Of course your father introduced me to Grape Nuts. He advised leaving them at least half an hour to soak in milk before eating.’

  ‘Yes. I remember.’

  ‘If I’d a proper-sized freezer as I did in the River House I could stock up on pastries. As it is I can offer you a Garibaldi. But that’s all.’

  It’s time to change the subject.

  ‘New drugs mother?’

  There’s a silver pillbox on the tray where she keeps her medication, one I haven’t seen before.

  ‘The doctor’s given me those for my sleep,’ she says. ‘The Co-codamol’s OK for the pain, but I have terrible nights.’

  ‘Yes. You said.’

  ‘You’ve no idea what it’s like to wake in the small hours. Not to be able to drift off again.’

  I do know, of course. Those eternal nights when nothing will still the soul. They’ve come back lately, since Kit left and Greg spends so much time away. I lie and fret. I worry for you, Mother, how I will manage your deterioration when there’s so little love to sustain us. I worry for Kit, out in the world. And anxiety grips me when I think that you will let Greg win and take the River House from me.

  My mother pours coffee, her back to me. I sense her shoulders stiffen. Her white perm bobs softly. I flinch. I know what’s coming.

  ‘I don’t sleep because I worry for the River House. The windows need replacing. The roof. And then there’s your voice consultancy.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Greg can’t approve of those sessions you arrange in the house?’

  ‘Of course he approves. He helped me set it up! You know that.’
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  ‘I don’t know what your father would have said. The comings and goings day and night. It isn’t the way to run a business, letting people poke about in your home.’

  ‘I’ve lost some clients in this recession in fact. The business may suffer.’

  She’s coming back, the bone-china plate held so precariously in one hand that the biscuits are in danger of sliding to the floor. I get up to rescue them but she moves irritably aside. I sit back down.

  ‘Then why are you determined to remain there? When everyone wants to move on? Why do you always make trouble, Sonia? Greg thinks the house is worth . . . what was it, something million? No. Impossible! Oh dear me. I do get my noughts mixed up. But it’s a gold mine! And yet you insist on staying!’

  ‘You spoke to Greg?’ I can hear the flint in my voice.

  ‘He does phone, from time to time. We talk. You know we talk. The River House is a yoke around my neck. It’s time you moved on. He understands that. It’s only you who digs your heels in, Sonia.’

  I’m in danger of losing my temper at this point. I stand up, say I need the loo. In her bathroom I curl my fingers over the porcelain of the basin, count to ten, try to control my fury. She knows how much this subject upsets me. Yet she persists! I think of the things I do for her. The little sacrifices I make, constantly, to keep her happy, yet she cannot let me be where I need to be. Now that Jez lies peaceful in the music room, it hurts me all the more. I’ve sacrificed being with him for her. What if he leaves before I return? What if I’ve lost him for the sake of keeping her appeased with gin and newpapers?

  Back in her sitting room I apologize, say I can only stay for twenty minutes this morning. Fortunately, my mother appears to have forgotten the subject of the River House. She hands me coffee and spends the rest of my visit recalling the singing teacher who flicked chalk at her across the classroom when she was a girl. She remembers the shade and texture of the teacher’s lipstick. Can even recall the hymn they sang that morning.

  ‘Break temptation’s fatal power,’ she warbles. Her pale-blue eyes water as she drifts back in time. ‘Shielding all with guardian care, Safe in every careless hour, Safe from sloth and sensual snare . . .’

  It’s what’s supposed to happen when you’re in your twilight years, this slipping from the present into the past, I think as I hurry at last back down the corridor. What’s odd is that it’s happened to me too recently, since Kit left home.

  Memories creep up on me. Push up against me the way a cat rubs itself against your leg, purring, refusing to be ignored. Feelings swamp me out of the blue. There’s nostalgia sometimes. More often there’s a startling upsurge of guilt, shame, regret. I wish I could talk to my mother about this, but her reactions are always tinged with criticism, with accusation. There are so many places I dare not go with her.

  Greg, Kit even, now she’s the age I was when I left the house for the first time, argue that the past is gone. You move on. For a long time, I agreed with them. After all, I’d been a student, worked as an actress. I’d married Greg, had a daughter and set up my own business. The past had been erased. Sometimes I reel at the number of years that have flowed away.

  But recently I’ve come to know that time does not pass, it folds. As the river loops back upon itself in Greenwich, so some distant years seem closer than those that have only just passed, and forgotten moments shove their way back in. It is, for example, a shock, a marvellous one, that I awoke this morning with the same sensation I had at thirteen when Seb and I first kissed. A revelation that the desire I had then – to feel his eyelashes against my fingers, my tongue against his lips, is still in me. Time has fallen away, a dust sheet slithering to the floor, to reveal what had always been beneath.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Saturday

  Sonia

  On the bus, a memory takes hold of me as I pass the Starbucks that was once our local sweet shop.

  A summer’s day. The middle of a heat wave. I was thirteen. Where was my mother that day? She must have started her teaching job, because I felt free in a way I never did when she was at home.

  I can feel the way the cotton of my sundress teased my thighs as I walked back from the shop along the alley. I sucked an orange ice lolly. My flip-flops caught on the paving stones that were sticky with drink and the dribblings of other people’s ice creams. The smell of the river was close and intense. Metallic, mixed with tar and alcohol. Always the residual scent of beer on the breeze round here, from the pubs, from dregs left by those who sat on the wall to drink. The tide was out. At the steep stone mooring steps near our house I went dreamily down, sucking my lolly. The riverweed that often left them slippy had dried out. At the bottom I kicked off my flip–flops and stood at the water’s edge. The river lapped at my feet, cooled them. Mud oozed up between my toes. I curled them round little hard objects buried there.

  ‘Sonia! Sonneeeah!’

  Startled out of my trance, I looked up. Out in the river, balancing on the edge of some old moored cargo barges, were Seb and his friend Mark, naked but for their underpants gone saggy in the water. Mark shoved Seb hard.

  ‘Hey Sonia, he-elp!’ cried Seb. He windmilled his arms, feigned terror, tumbled sideways into the water, and vanished into its depths. Mark collapsed laughing. After a bit, when Seb hadn’t reappeared, Mark dived after him. Now both were under the soupy brown water, so thick with gunk it barely reflected the sun. Seconds passed. Minutes. Nothing broke the dense surface. My heart began to thump, my mouth went dry, the lolly stuck to my tongue.

  At last, a splash. A head. Mark. He clambered back onto the barge and disappeared into its bows.

  Still no Seb.

  I stepped into the water. Stared out at the motionless river, a heat haze blurring the wharves down towards Blackwall. Everything fell silent.

  A motor launch went past, sending waves hurrying over the surface towards me where they leapt up at my calves, before everything went still again. My heart stopped. I couldn’t breathe. The world had ended.

  Then, at last, whoosh!

  Seb appeared a few feet from me, dripping with oil and river muck. He lurched at me, grabbed my arm, and dragged me towards him. I resisted for a bit. Dropped the dregs of my lolly, sank my nails into the flesh of his shoulders. He laughed. I tried to kick him but it was hopeless, he was so much stronger than me. Soon the water was up to my thighs, my dress clung to my skin. He pulled me again and I lost my balance. The cool water was a relief after the heat. I followed him in, splashing furiously, and he taunted me, ‘Oooh, scary Sonia.’

  Mark joined us. They climbed onto me and pushed my head under. Seb grabbed my legs. I lashed out, reached for their hair, missed, bit Mark’s arm hard. He yelled and let go and I gasped lungfuls of muggy air as my face came back into the sunshine.

  Wet cloth slapping against me in the cool murky water. Seb’s strong hands on my ankles. The sun beating down above us.

  ‘Time for a beer!’ Seb cried, letting go of me, and he and Mark began to front crawl, racing towards the barges, rather than the shore. I swam behind them trying not to let the river splash into my mouth. I’d been told there were poisons in the water that could paralyze you. It was thick, it felt sticky on my skin as I swam. I could not see beneath the fetid surface. You could develop photos in it, that’s what people said. It was a chemical broth, barely water at all. As I swam I felt things brush against my legs. The ticklish drag of a plastic bag, the nudge of something large and slimy. I tried not to imagine what else might touch me, lick me. Eat me even.

  Out in the middle, a riverbus passed, its passengers waving cheerily. On the other side, the wharves of the Isle of Dogs were shrouded in thick grey fumes. At the barges, I tried to haul myself up as the boys had done, but slipped on the algae-covered edge. The wood splintered my hands and my nails broke as I clawed at the sides.

  ‘What a sissy!’ Mark yelled. ‘Pathetic isn’t she, Seb?’

  ‘Leave her alone,’ said Seb and my heart swelled. I found a foothold towar
ds the back of the boat where a tyre was attached and managed to clamber in. The boys had fashioned some old fishing net into a bag, tied on a rope, brought cans of lager and packets of crisps out in it. They’d hung the net over the edge of the barge with the lager in to keep it cool in the water. We lay back on the boat’s hot wooden floor hidden from view of the outside world and let the sun dry the river-water from our clothes. There was a gentle knock knock knock as the barges bumped against each other. Then a police boat passed, trailing a wake that made the barges sway, creak, and bash together alarmingly, so we were tossed about as if in the midst of a storm.

  When they settled back down again there was nothing but sun and scalding wood and us. ‘Do this,’ Seb told me, making an ‘O’ shape with his lips.

  I did as he asked. He took a swig of lager, leant over me, pressed his lips against mine, and let the cold liquid seep slowly into my mouth. It tasted tinny and cool, against the warmth of him. I felt strange, as if my legs were melting in the sun. Then Seb turned to Mark and did the same with him. He asked me to do it back to each of them. He wanted to feel what it would be like, he said. He was always wondering what things would feel like. It was lovely, the cold of the liquid coming in from between warm lips, so we carried on like this for a while longer, drinking from each other’s mouths until the lager grew tepid.

  ‘Touch my tongue with yours,’ Seb said then, and so I did. Mark watched. Seb wrapped his tongue around mine and kissed me long and hard. He tasted of beer and river.

  ‘Oh yuck, you moron,’ Mark said, and Seb peeled his mouth off mine and kissed Mark instead. That shut him up.

  ‘I’m gonna swim under the barges,’ said Seb.

  ‘Don’t Seb. What’s the point?’

  ‘What’s the point in anything? Just wanna see if I can.’