Tideline

by Penny Hancock

  The shops along the high street are specific: Christine’s Pork, the Egg Shop, the Fish Shop, Lobo Halal Meat, the Religious Icons shop. I draw in the smell of fried breakfasts that wafts out of the cafés. There’s a constant exchange of goods amongst what seems a merry throng of people. I feel excluded and envious of their sense of community as I pass the pound shops, the hairdressers offering corn rows at special prices for children, the Pie and Mash shop, even the funeral parlour. The whole of London is constantly shifting, being knocked down and rebuilt. The landscape of the river changes daily before my eyes. But Deptford High Street has managed so far, in its essence, to resist the bang and crash of change.

  Back along Creek Road, past the billboards promising a new life experience this side of the river. Luxury apartments and cafés and gardens, they proclaim, will replace the decaying wharves and disused refineries and crumbling abandoned footpaths.

  I pop into Casbah records as I come back into Greenwich, and my hand lands immediately on the CD I want: ‘The Best of Tim Buckley’.

  ‘Open them.’

  As well as his presents I’ve brought Jez coffee, satsumas I could not resist from a fruit stall, and almond croissants from Rhodes.

  This has to be a good day. It has to stay lit up in his memory, radiating golden light. I sit next to him.

  ‘They don’t call it sweet sixteen for nothing,’ I say. ‘Very soon it’ll be gone. You as you are now, pffff!’

  I’m ashamed to feel tears spring to my eyes. I look him up and down, from the top of his head to his toes. He’s got that expectant look on his face, almost as though he was waiting for me to come to him, an innocent, but slightly insolent look.

  He pulls the paper off the parcels. ‘“The Best of Tim Buckley”,’ he says. ‘Hey that’s cool. It’s the one I wanted. Oh, and some DVDs. Thanks, Sonia.’ He looks at me and I can see he’s trying to smile but he’s in conflict.

  ‘Has Mum called yet? Has Helen?’

  When he swallows I can hear the saliva stick, his mouth’s dry. He’s still worrying about getting home.

  ‘Don’t look so forlorn,’ I tell him. ‘You can listen to the CD, or watch a film. Look, I’ll put this on now. I’ve few things to do, but when I get back, we can go.’

  ‘Go?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘So . . . I am leaving?’

  ‘You are.’

  His eyes widen. Regain their shine. His facial muscles relax and the original beauty that has been somewhat lost under the veil of anxiety and pain from his ankle, returns to his face. It’s a little hurtful.

  ‘Greg’s coming home soon. You can’t stay. I’m sorry. There won’t be room. You must collect up your stuff.’

  ‘So,’ he says. He can’t quite suppress the excitement that flickers in his face. I notice the side of his nose twitch.

  ‘It is some sort of surprise you’ve all been cooking up! You’re making out it’s because your husband’s coming home! You can stop pretending now.’ He leans his head back comfortably on the pillows, sighs. ‘I thought you and Helen and Alicia were planning a surprise party for me! But I’m like, would you go to these extremes? It sounds sad now, I know. I was scared there was something weird going on!’

  ‘Weird?’

  ‘Kind of . . . well you got to admit it looks a bit strange . . . the scarves, the locked door—’

  ‘Jez!’

  ‘Yeah, but then I thought but you’ve been beast too.’

  ‘Beast?’

  ‘Cool. Good to me, with the guitars, the food and wine and getting me contacts.’

  ‘Of course. I never wanted to frighten you, Jez.’

  ‘I know. I can see that now. It’s just – and I’ll tell Helen too – it all did seem a bit dodgy.’

  That makes me feel dirty. I shake my head.

  ‘Don’t ever think things like that about me,’ I say. ‘Now listen. We just need a little time to prepare things. I’ll be back to get you. Enjoy the morning.’

  I leave him watching The Night of the Hunter and hurry down the alley.

  Our garage is in a row of three, just along the alley from the River House, accessible by the side road that goes up to the high street. It backs on to the river, a thirty foot drop below. The one tiny window, no more than a foot square, opens just wide enough to let some air in, but barely any light. It’s reinforced in that grid wire that makes me think of primary school classroom doors. The garage smells of damp, dust, mildew. There won’t be time to clean it properly and the cobwebs are thick and old and full of dead spiders, hanging suspended in their own webs. As I peer more closely I realize that they’re not whole spiders but just the husks, perfectly formed, as if the inner spider had got up and walked away, leaving an inside-out skeleton of itself. I stare for some time at this phenomenon. Perfect replicas of themselves in their own webs.

  One of the pieces of furniture I’ve left in here is a pine bed I never liked. It’s been in the garage since we returned from the country and is leaning up against the back wall, its mattress protected from the damp by polythene. Once I’ve made a space by shifting the office furniture to the side, I pull it down and place it in the middle of the room. I leave the filing cabinet and shelf units, the swivel chair and a pile of old vinyl records, so the room has the semblance of somewhere cosy, habitable. Kit’s old cot can stay too, it’s in pieces and stacked up in the corner. But there are piles of tools, cans of spray paint, varnish, a ladder and gardening implements including a hoe, all of which I’ll have to get rid of or store elsewhere.

  I’m standing in the open doorway, surveying all this and trying to decide how best to shift the unwanted stuff when Betty from one of the houses round the corner walks by.

  ‘Having a clear out?’ she asks, her breath rising in a cloud of mist in the cold air.

  ‘I need to free up some space,’ I say, hoping by my terse tone to put her off any further conversation.

  She watches me. I try to look busy.

  ‘You’ll be able to put the car in there when you’ve got rid of all that junk,’ she says. ‘Your mother always kept hers in there – it’s safer than the street.’

  I smile. I’ve always kept the car on the road and I know it’s one of Betty’s bugbears, though I’ve never been able to understand why it bothers her so much. After all, it’s my problem if it gets stolen. It won’t affect her. She trundles towards the corner and I’m relieved to see she’s about to disappear. Then she turns and says,

  ‘It’s a good job it’s secure. There’s all sorts of frightful goings-on around here these days. I hardly feel safe in my own home.’

  ‘That’s what people have always said about this area,’ I say. ‘Nothing’s really changed Betty. We’re lucky to live next to the river. I shall never leave.’

  The garage is cold and damp. It’s not my choice to move Jez from his lovely music room with its light pouring in where he can sit in comfort playing his guitar. I don’t want to entomb him like a corpse. I think of veal then, the way the flesh of young calves is kept pure, remains tender in the dark. A kind of preservation after all. And it’ll only be for two days, it can’t do my boy any harm. Might even do him good. The important thing is that he’ll be safe here. Nothing can happen to him while he’s in my care.

  I shift some of the old stuff in the garage into the car boot and drive to the tip. Other bits and pieces I carry along to the River House. I put Greg’s step ladder, the hoe, and other gardening implements in the corner of the courtyard against the back wall. The jump leads, the jack and tools I put in the cupboard under the stairs. I need to complete the preparation before I take Jez his supper. Then I can relax and spend time with him before we have to make our move.

  When I’ve cleared the garage I return to the house. I rummage through the airing cupboard. A waft of freshly laundered air embraces me, sends me whirring back in time so that I stand for a few seconds, my nose buried in cloth. The cupboard is full of piles of folded linen that have been in the house for as long as I
can remember, the texture crisp and smooth, conjuring childhood bedtimes tucked tightly between two crisp sheets. A feeling of deep security you rarely experience again in life.

  Then I see him at one end of the iron bed. Late winter, like now. An imperceptible tilt in the earth, the smell of stirrings in the air, the beginnings of new growth, and although it was not daylight, and the room was in shadow, there was a luminous quality to the dark sky even at six o’clock. We were exhilarated from some earlier exertions. Where had we been? Out on the river maybe? My face glowed. My skin tingled. Seb’s feet were caked in mud, so we must have been down on the shore. Mudlarking. He went into the shower room and I heard the gush of water as he scrubbed his feet. I was on the bed, knowing what was about to come, filled with anticipation, afraid of the power of it.

  The click of the shower-room door, and the pad of bare feet on floorboards. The squish of the mattress as he lay opposite me, his head against the foot board whilst mine was against the pillow in its crisp linen cover.

  He pressed his big toe into my mouth. I could taste soap, and the faint residue of the river mud he’d tried to scrub away. It was intriguing, the taste, and the sensation, his toenail scraping the roof of my mouth. I sucked at his big toe and he lay back, his hands behind his head and made happy grunting noises until something interrupted us. What was it? I can’t remember now. I only have the vaguest recollection that something sudden, a bang or a crash, intruded on our privacy so that we stopped, startled, abandoned our game. Seb got up and turned on me.

  ‘You’re a toe-sucking weirdo,’ he said, and I stuck my tongue out at him, not knowing how else to defend myself.

  I draw in a deep breath, gather myself. I put two sheets, a single duvet, and two pillows into a bin liner. Jez is going to need more than this to keep warm. I don’t have a heater since we had central heating installed in the River House. I’ll have to buy an old-fashioned paraffin thing tomorrow, if there’s time before Greg arrives. For now, I add an old green and white checked blanket that we used to take camping with us. Packing for Jez’s move is a bit like preparing for a camping trip. It arouses in me a fizz of anticipation. What I’d really like to do is to plan this with him, the way Seb and I planned our adventures. We could compose a list together, enjoy the excitement that precedes a holiday under the stars. We’d unearth big cook’s boxes of matches, plastic plates, tinned food. Cans of butane gas for the one-ring gas stove. Little pans that stack one inside the other. But of course this is impossible. Jez would get upset if I told him he was camping in a garage. He’d do something impulsive.

  For now I must work alone. I gather tea lights, candles (things my parents must’ve kept in the kitchen drawer since those regular winter power cuts in the seventies), toilet paper, a bucket with a lid we used for compost at one stage in our lives, before we gave up trying to be green. I secrete a pack of my mother’s incontinence pads into a bag; they may be necessary. I unearth the groundsheet that still retains its smell of warm grass, even after being aired and stored for years.

  I smile as I think of the tupperware containers of tea bread, the torches, and the windshield we used to stuff into the back of the car when Kit was a little girl. In those days our holidays were taken on the chilly Norfolk coast in campsites full of earnest families. They were always better equipped for the outdoor life than we were. Kit refused to use the communal toilets, because of the daddy-long-legs that coated every surface. Then at night she wouldn’t sleep in her own little separate tent. She’d lie tucked between us, wrapped in this very same green and white checked blanket. Who was more relieved that she lay next to us, her or me? At any rate, I ensured she was snuggled up in the middle, a welcome buffer between Greg and me. How old was she in those camping years? Five? Six? We stopped them once Greg was earning serious money, began to go to villas in Italy, Spain or France.

  Kit’s childhood has become a blur to me. As if it were not me, but some other woman who breastfed her for nearly two years, eased her passage into the outside world. Some other, better woman who smoothed Sudocrem onto her nappy rash, put plasters on her knees, Calpol into her mouth, nit combs through her hair. Who was that woman who attended toddler groups, baked cakes? Later, when we were back at the River House, the person who traipsed with her around the gigantic Top Shop at Oxford Circus? When did I change? Was it a step-by-step process? When she ran to a friend instead of me at playgroup, and I realized I was no longer the centre of her universe? When she went out on her bike alone so I no longer knew where she was every second of the day? The first time I accidentally saw her kiss a boy and knew with a pang she was no longer a child?

  Or was it a sweeping catastrophic change? Did it happen suddenly, during the lonely car journey home after leaving her at university? When the terrible realization hit me that everyone we love only comes into our lives to leave us again?

  Just before I return to the garage, I take a hot-water bottle and fill it, so that Jez’s bed will be warm when he gets in. I drag the bin liner along the alley to the garage. It’s almost dark and there’s a fine, spitting, icy rain. I could do with a torch after all. It’s pitch black inside the garage. I can’t leave the door open while I work, in case a passer-by becomes suspicious, takes more interest than they should. But even with the door shut, there’s a draft from a crack in the window that keeps blowing out the candles. I manage to get some tea lights lit eventually; they give off a gentle yellow light that’s welcoming, even cosy.

  Once the bed’s made up I begin to feel nervous. How am I going to get Jez into the garage without being seen? Obviously, I’ll have to leave it until late, after the pub’s shut, after the last drinkers have gone. And I’ll need to use the last of my mother’s tablets. Enough to keep him compliant, but not too many or he won’t be able to walk independently.

  There’s no guarantee even then that Betty, or some insomniac or late-night reveller, won’t see us as we come along the alley. I’ll make him wear an anorak with a hood. There’s one that Greg bought hanging in the hallway on a hook, probably for one of those long-ago camping holidays. With the hood up no one’ll look twice at him. I’ll work quickly and keep every sense peeled, alert.

  I ram a strip of scarf into the crack under the window to stop the draft, and place a group of tea lights on one of the filing cabinets and light them too. Cars are drawing up outside now, the swift gleam of headlights through the narrow crack between the doors as they sweep round the corner looking for parking spaces. People tramp past on foot to go to the pub, their voices raised, excited. The mattress feels damp, but I cover it in the ground sheet and make up the bed with the clean sheets. I pile the blanket and old eiderdowns on top of the duvet. The smell of earthy walls and chalk is pungent in the darkness. How much more exquisite things will be after he’s been deprived of light for a few days. He’ll only have to stay here until Greg and Kit have left again. Then how luminous the music room will appear to him.

  ‘What shall I tell people?’ Jez asks, looking at me with such trust, such innocence that I feel a tiny glimmer of remorse about what is going to happen.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Well, I can’t say I’ve been locked in your house, can I? It’ll sound odd to people, even if it was because of this surprise thing. I don’t want you or Helen to get into trouble for this. And what am I going to tell Alicia?’

  ‘Tell her the truth. That you wanted to stay, to get some music contacts, and I let you.’

  ‘But not getting in touch?’

  ‘Jez! Stop worrying. You needed time to yourself. It’s simple.’

  He takes an enormous slurp of the tea I’ve brought him.

  ‘I’m sorry I’ve been rude at times. It was ungrateful.’

  ‘There’s no need to apologize,’ I say.

  ‘That first night when we got wasted, I actually hoped you might say you’d rent me a room here. When I come over for college.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Well, yeah! Helen’d had a go at me that afternoon
so I thought well she doesn’t want me living with them. I thought it’d be good to live here, but I didn’t think you’d want me. Then, the being trapped freaked me out a bit. I got the wrong end of the stick and I’ve been ungrateful, so you know, I’m sorry.’ He’s taken on that self-assured voice again, the one he first used as he sat and drank wine in the kitchen nearly a week ago. It’s good to see the more relaxed side of him. Over the last few days he’s been too quiet. Too cowed.

  ‘So if I were to say you could stay . . .’ It feels as if my heart has had a power surge and I’m zooming forward into another reality entirely.

  Jez’s mouth widens into a smile and in the corners are two tiny lines, though I can perceive a nerviness, an uncertainty in the way the creases flicker.

  ‘Well, obviously I’d like to get home today. It’s my birthday. And it’s already almost over. When are we going?’

  ‘Soon.’

  ‘Not now?’

  ‘There are a few more things to get ready.’ I try not to sound hurt that he’s so eager, after all, to leave me. ‘Patience, Jez.’

  When I return to the high windows I see that the drug’s taking effect. He’s on the bed, writhing a little as if trying to fight the sleep that overwhelms him. I plan to wait until it begins to wear off, when he’ll be able to limp as far as the garage, but won’t be so alert as to work out exactly what’s going on. I open the door quietly and go into the music room. I sit down on the bed beside him.

  ‘Shall I tell you a story?’

  ‘Is it time to go?’

  ‘A little longer. A story would pass the time.’

  ‘OK then. Alright. ’

  I lie beside him on the bed, he moves over a little, making room for me.

  ‘It’s called Mudlarks,’ I tell him. I put my hand up and stoke his hair. He nestles his head into me. I stroke the tender skin on his throat. He’s giving in at last. It’s growing dark outside as I speak, and still raining hard. It’s cold in the music room. I pull the duvet over us both and speak slowly, soothingly.