Dot and Mavis were good at inertia. It is after all the natural preserve of the teenager to lie immobile on a bed thinking deep thoughts they are yet to understand. Besides, they had just finished school, which still seemed like the hardest point of their lives: they knew that they were waiting, that something new was around the corner, whether they wanted it or not.
Tony had learnt to fill his days by taking the short walk to Ron’s shop after the school drop-off every morning. He knew that bringing up children is lonely and solitary and that we live in a cold, damp country where there is often a cloud overhead and that the washing up can take all morning if you let it. So, his nothing was to sit in the back of a small shop with an old man whom he’d grown to love, one either side of a thick wooden table, pockmarked with years of good honest work. A bright bulb without a shade hung over the table illuminating all they did, discouraging shadow. Pieces of clocks, toasters, vacuum cleaners, beloved toys and sentimental radios rested in neat piles. Each man had his tools and magnifying glass. Radio 4 droned on comfortingly in the corner and if someone came into the shop one of them would stand up to see what they needed. People thanked them when a much-loved item was restored, small amounts of money changed hands and tea was always being offered between them. Sometimes they barely spoke and at other times they didn’t stop all day. On more than one occasion Ron had stopped what he was doing to put a friendly arm round Tony’s shoulders as they heaved with his tears. This was his nothing, and yet it was so much more than something.
Alice was now bound to the house. For a while after Tony had left and Dot was still small she’d flirted with the idea of moving away, to London or even further. But that was long gone now. She had even got used to Dot getting up and fixing her own breakfast and leaving for school on her own. She didn’t ask her daughter any more what time she might be home or what she’d like for supper. Dot was nearly an adult and she was developing adult sensibilities. Once a week Alice drove to the big supermarket in Cartertown to stock up on tins and loo roll and pasta and packets. Otherwise she’d walk into the village when they needed things and patronise the butcher or the greengrocer, and sometimes the newsagent. She knew that other people had interests; her mother for example loved the garden as if it was a person and spent hours planning the planting. But since the village play all those years ago, which had come to nothing, nothing more had ever come to Alice. She quite liked reading although sometimes weeks could elapse between her finishing one book and starting another; she was an adequate seamstress; she fed them all; but nothing grabbed her and made her want to investigate it until she’d mastered it. Ideas turned to dust in her head, or at least that’s what it felt like. She would think about making a cushion or looking up a recipe or going to see the bluebells and be immediately struck by how pointless it all was. Everything would be over in less time than it took to do. One day they would all be dead anyway and then who would care that the roses had a colour theme or that chocolate tasted good or that the curtains matched the duvet cover? She had become good at sitting still, at resting her hands peacefully in her lap while she sat at the kitchen table. At lying in bed when she had no intention of sleeping. At walking through the village as if she had somewhere to go. At watching a film as if she was interested in the ending. She waited for Dot to be around and tell her things in the way she used to wait for the phone to ring. In another life she liked to think that she’d have made a good Buddhist.
Clarice employed order. There was a relentless routine to her life which she followed every day. Same time to rise, same time to bed, with everything she needed to know in between. She rarely left the house and garden any more, finding nothing more fascinating than what occurred within her small realm. Not that she wasn’t interested in the world. She watched Channel 4 news every night and read the Daily Mail every day. She did the crossword and Sudoku to keep her mind active and loved it when Dot came home with a film or stayed in on a Saturday night to watch terrible game shows. She had breakfast and lunch at the kitchen table and dinner in the dining room. She had a cup of tea by the fire in winter and under the apple tree in summer at four o’clock precisely. She walked the garden in the mornings and spoke to Peter about the planting or the weeds or the vegetables. On Tuesdays and Thursdays she told Mary what needed to be done and had a cup of coffee with her at eleven, listening to Mary’s children and now grandchildren grow up. On Wednesday afternoons she put on her wellies and walked on Conniton Hill with Lillian and her dreadful dogs and on Sundays she went to church, not because she believed but because it was expected of her. And once a month on a Thursday evening she drove to Stella Baycliff’s house just outside Druith where a group of them played bridge and drank one or two sherries and exchanged news. She slept well each night, her mind untroubled by too many dreams, her body tired out enough not to let her stay awake.
Sandra spent most of her time looking down. You had to keep your eyes down if you were going to spot all the dirt. There was no point in doing the washing up and staring out of the window or polishing a table and looking at the wall. And there was always more dirt; it was as if the others didn’t notice that everything they did disturbed something which caught a piece of dust or brought in a speck of mud. Sandra could remember Gerry saying to her a few years before, ‘What do you want us to do? Move out and seal you into the house so that it’s always perfect?’ She hadn’t answered but she had kept the thought neatly in a part of her mind so that she could always get it out and admire it like the china cats on the mantelpiece. She only had to shut her eyes to see her house wrapped in a giant roll of cling film, its insides gleaming and sparkling. She started upstairs every day, believing that the dirt would flow downwards. She made their bed and cleaned the bathroom. She put away any washing and tidied up clothes that Gerry might have left lying around. Mavis had put a lock on her door and so she couldn’t go in there, but as the door was always shut she could also pretend that the room didn’t exist. Next she did the sitting room, plumping cushions and dusting all the objects. She followed this with the dining room, polishing the table and chairs and again dusting anything on any surface. The kitchen always seemed to take the longest as there were so many chrome surfaces which needed washing and then rubbing down with oil and even when you’d finished there was always another streak. The dishwasher had to be emptied the second it was finished, as did the washing machine, and the ironing had to be tackled every day. The windows also needed washing every third day and the bed sheets had to be changed twice a week, on Mondays and Thursdays. The last thing she did was to hoover the house from top to bottom, changing heads to get into every corner. This alone could take up to an hour every day and often made her shake and sweat with the exertion. Finally she would wash the kitchen floor, emptying the dirty water down the loo so she could immediately replace the mop and bucket in the cupboard under the stairs. Sandra didn’t listen to the radio but worked in silence, often forgetting to eat and making do with a mug of instant coffee, which had to be washed as it was finished. Her hands were red and raw and her hair hung loosely round her face. And then Gerry or Mavis would come home and the mess started all over again.
Over the years Gerry had found a nothingness in sex. Not with his wife, of course, whom he had last made love to sixteen years before, but with a succession of faceless women whom he barely registered as human. Since the Alice debacle and right up until Dot he’d kept these encounters professional. He was a regular at lap-dancing clubs and massage parlours in towns like Paddockbridge and Woolley, a good hour and a half’s drive from his home. Occasionally he would simply go to a pub in one of those industrial towns where he could still pull a woman who expected as little as him, although he’d noticed that these encounters were becoming steadily seedier and more depressing with each passing year. He always wore a condom and he never kissed any of them because he still held out hope that one day Sandra would let him kiss her again, even if only on the cheek. Bodies were good at giving absolution; they were warm and giving, tende
r and fragile and a good reminder that you were alive. And then there was the rush of the orgasm, which flowed through his body like a drug, washing over his frayed nerves and calming his whirling brain. It was one of the few times when Gerry stopped seeing the destruction he’d caused in his life. He would lie still for a few minutes afterwards, anaesthetised to the world, a great silence inside him. A cigarette could prolong the sensation, so that on the drive home he might even smile. But then he would walk through his spotless front door and neither his wife nor his daughter would acknowledge him and he knew that everything he did disturbed Sandra’s order and the tension would flood back so that his eyes burnt with the effort it took not to cry. He’d grabbed at the chance Dot offered him, but along with everything else he’d got that wrong too: it had been yet more nothing and the realisation that only his wife offered him a something was starting to make him feel desperate.
10 … Bewilderment
So, Tony has just left and I probably should go and find Alice in whatever corner of the house she is hiding, but, truth be told, I can’t face it. I have received the third truly shocking news of my life; first my mother, second Howie and now Alice. I suppose you could say Jack’s death was shocking, but I was too young and besides he’d been ill for about a year before he died. And after Mother I was always waiting for the news about Father. Really I shouldn’t lump Alice’s news in with all this death, but that’s what it feels like: the end of her life, except she doesn’t even realise it. The people l love always seem to let me down one way or another; or maybe I should look at it from a different viewpoint, maybe there’s some intrinsic fault in me that makes them want to let me down.
I saw Alice’s face when she was telling me and I am sure I am not wrong to say that she enjoyed hurting me. Not the way that young girls so often come up against their mothers, because we never do any of the usual screaming and shouting and door slamming. More that it gave her a ghastly pleasure to cause me pain. That’s almost the worst of it, actually: that I could have done such a terrible job of being her mother as I have so obviously done. Of course I know that I’ve been far from perfect, but I do love her and I obviously haven’t managed to convey that at all. How did Howie do it? That’s what I’d like to know. How did he make it always look so easy? How did he have the courage to kiss her and bounce her and tell her he loved her? How did it not terrify him to his very bowels to give so much of himself to someone else, to invest all his happiness in another fragile human being?
I went to stand by the window when they were telling me as I needed to see a marker, like the rose bushes, to make sense of it all. The light was on the window, but I swear I saw myself skipping down the path at the bottom of the garden. I was even wearing my favourite blue dress from when I was, what, twelve, and my hair was streaming behind me. I had to dance when Father told me about Mother, there didn’t seem to be any other appropriate reaction. I went into the garden and danced under her window, trying to feel my way around the thought that I was never going to see her again. Of course it seemed impossible; I always presumed it was too big a concept for my young mind, until the police told me about Howie and I realised it had nothing to do with being a child. Because trying to understand that particular thought is the worst thing about death, the desperate scrabble the brain makes of trying to fit the pieces together, as if you could dip your hand into time like it was a pond and fish out the bits you need to make a whole. People talk about waking up after someone they love has died and forgetting for a second, and then the awful business of remembering, but I don’t think I ever forgot, I think I awoke with the desperate impression that I could change it.
Her hair was still in her brush when I was allowed into her room after the body had been removed. I took it and held it as though it was the most precious thing I would ever own, but of course hair is dead even when it is on your head and nothing to get excited about. Alice looks so like Mother. She looked like her the moment she was born. I never told Howie that, it seemed too dangerous to say out loud, but I wish I had now, I wish I had shared some of the things I know with at least one other person. Because what if looks signify more than genetic alignment? What if my mother’s character has seeped through the generations as well? What if I am no more than a conduit of her, sandwiched between two women unable to love me as I love them? Certainly Alice has my mother’s distance, that disconcerting way of looking through you, as if there’s always someone more interesting over your shoulder. They both have the same icy blue eyes that stare when they don’t understand something, as if ordinary life is too banal for goddesses like them. They are dangerous women.
To think that when they first walked in I presumed she was parading an unsuitable boyfriend before me and I felt a stab of excitement as I thought we might be moving on to a more normal footing. I allowed myself whole minutes of fantasy in which we raised our voices and came to agreements and learnt how to live with each other. But of course Alice had done something spectacular, how could I ever have imagined otherwise?
I can’t remember much of our conversation, I lost all sense of myself when she told me that she was pregnant. She wanted to leave me though, I do remember that, as distinctly as I know every word on Howie’s grave. She thought they could go and live in Cartertown in one room and live off – what? – love, I suppose. You know nothing about love, she said to me and she is quite possibly right.
At least Tony seems to have his head screwed on. I can see what she likes about him. He is obviously good-looking, although I don’t like his long hair or his tight jeans, but that is nothing. He also seems to be more than the sum of his parts. When he sat opposite me and said that Alice could not live in some room in Cartertown, I saw that he understood her. And more than that, he cared for her. He had weighed up the situation and made a choice, the right choice if you ask me. Of course they must live here and, who knows, maybe it will all turn out fine. Maybe a baby will be the making of Alice. I was having a hard time imagining what she might do with her life and maybe this is a good solution. We do not live in a world of nannies and entertaining like when my mother had me and so Alice will have to take on these responsibilities and maybe she’ll be good at it?
The problem is that he is scared. I saw his eyes flicking over everything when he walked in; I heard the stammer in his voice when he spoke to me. And scared is not the best way to enter a marriage. It is hard enough to get right when you are as in love as Howie and I were, but when you are scared and bemused and feeling inferior it stands little to no chance.
Howie used to laugh at me when I insisted on things being right, as I so stupidly called the traditions we pass down through the generations. But he understood what I meant. He could find me amusing because his mother had been almost the same person as me and so I was easy to love. But Tony will be lost in Alice and she in him. They will speak words in the same language and yet their meaning will be obscured by their experience.
It’s strange because when I couldn’t get pregnant I don’t think Howie was really that bothered. He worried for me because I was so desperate, but if it had turned out that we never had children I don’t think he would have been heartbroken. But then when Alice came along he fell in love with her so easily and readily. I think with men it is always the actuality, whereas women prefer ideas. Women can live whole lives in ideas, create realities out of nothing. Oh Howie, what would you make of this? The best, I imagine, although if you were still here, no doubt she wouldn’t have got pregnant in the first place.
You know, Howie, sometimes I hate you for leaving me. Often I hate you, Mother. Someone, I forget who, once said that love and hate are very similar emotions and they are so, so right. Why did you go out in that storm? The coastguard at the inquest said that it had been fine when you left, but you must have seen the storm approaching. You used to tell me how that was one of your favourite aspects of sailing, how you could look across the sea and see the weather approaching, like different seasons in the same day. If you saw that storm, why
did you carry on? Or maybe you didn’t, maybe you turned back, that’s what the coastguard said was most likely. Of course your boat was so broken up it was impossible to tell what you had been doing, but I’m sure you headed for home. I’m sure you tutted at the wind in your pragmatic way. I hope to God you never even saw the boom coming, never felt a thing. You were there one minute and not the next; that’s all there is, that’s all there is for anyone. A ceaseless journey from one breath to the next, until it stops and we become nothing more than blood, flesh and bone. Except we were denied even that of you. Oh God, Howie, please come home. Please don’t leave me alone any more.
Everything changes and yet it stays the same. I am not shocked any more by the poll tax riots on the television or striking miners with starving children or continents baking in a relentless heat that deprives the land of food and water. I have realised that the only truly shocking things to me concern the people I love. If I was an African mother or a miner’s child, I would feel shock for these things, but they would look at me and feel nothing. This world we fight our way through is only personal and I think maybe I have realised that too late.
11 … Acting
Clive Buzzard liked to think he knew things. And one of the things of which he was most sure was the accrued worth of him and Debbie in Druith. He and Debbie made a fine couple, they were like the Posh and Becks of their moment, except cooler and more relevant.
Clive liked to say that he was all about rap music. His father was Druith’s parish priest and his mother ran the Sunday school and battered women’s shelter in Cartertown, but Clive liked to dream that he had been born in downtown Harlem and that if only Public Enemy could meet him they’d embrace him as a true brother. His family lacked imagination, that was their problem. His sister liked to please, doing well at school, getting into university, never staying out past twelve and seemingly had little or no interest in boys. Clive wanted to keep it real, hardly understanding that real is whatever you deem it to be and that Public Enemy’s reality was irrelevant to him.
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