The Home Corner

by Ruth Thomas

  ‘Yes,’ my mother said now, ‘well, it’s a really . . .’

  ‘Anyway,’ Stella interrupted, ‘I suppose I’d better get on with the shopping. I’m doing Thai fishcakes, for my sins,’ she added – a statement that utterly depressed me, because it was one of those cheerily bland things people say when they have run out of anything else. It never had anything to do with sins; it was just what people said.

  ‘It’s this really fiddly recipe,’ Stella added as my mother smiled, said goodbye and wandered away with our trolley. ‘It’s got prawns in it. I don’t know why I chose it now.’

  ‘You didn’t have to choose Thai fishcakes though, presumably,’ I snapped, because I couldn’t resist it suddenly, and it saddened me, to see my mother dismissed. ‘I mean, presumably no one forced you to make Thai fishcakes, Stella?’

  But she was already beginning to move on too, with her basket.

  ‘Oh, and by the way, Stella,’ I continued in a sudden rush, because I knew it was now or never, really, and I suspected I might never see her again anyway – the odds were against it – ‘by the way,’ I said, as my mother rounded a corner and disappeared down the cereals aisle, ‘how’s Ed?’

  Stella stopped.

  ‘Who?’

  I looked her. What do you mean, ‘Who?’ I thought. How do you mean, ‘Who?’

  ‘Oh, you mean Ed!’ Stella exclaimed. She was already several feet away from me and had to raise her voice slightly. ‘Ed from school, you mean? Ed McRae?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said, feeling oddly light-headed. Of course Ed from school, of course. And I felt almost like a person who wasn’t there at all any more: some hollow, husk-like thing, a waning moon, a dried pod of honesty. The supermarket was very white and sad and celestial. ‘I mean,’ I said, ‘are you and . . . Ed still . . .’

  Stella looked slightly entertained.

  ‘God, no!’ she said. ‘That’s ancient history! That was never going to work. God! That was over a year ago! Have you still got a thing about Ed McRae?’

  ‘Sorry?’ I asked.

  ‘That all ended ages ago. Practically as soon as we all left school! God, that was just a bit of a fling!’

  Something curious was happening to my heart: a kind of blanching. My heart, as well as my head, had started to hurt.

  ‘No, I haven’t seen Ed for months!’ Stella confirmed cheerfully. ‘He’s going out with some girl in Bristol now, anyway, as far as I know. Some fellow architect.’

  I didn’t know which words to form. Something felt as if it was falling away. ‘It’s funny,’ I croaked eventually, ‘because last time I saw you, you were this great . . . item!’

  ‘I know!’ said Stella, heartily. She seemed to find the whole thing about Ed McRae quite amusing. ‘Well, it was really lovely to see you,’ she smiled. And she glanced upwards again, for the briefest of moments, at my mad pink hair. Maybe she was envisaging telling her body buddies about it over dinner. ‘Glad to hear you’re enjoying St . . . thingummy’s anyway, Lulu. St Luke’s. I’ll give you a ring. We should get together for a coffee. It would be nice to have a proper catch-up.’

  And she legged it past the salads aisle, turned and disappeared. I feared we would probably bump into each other again, rounding the corner of the bread section or maybe even the oriental ready-meals, but she was not there, at the end of any aisle.

  ‘What are body buddies?’ my mother asked, as we stood at the checkout beside the little display of bagged sweets, waiting to put our shopping on the conveyor belt.

  ‘I think they’re people you hang out with at vet school,’ I replied. I could feel my heart racing, the way it had once at the dentist’s when I’d been given an injection of adrenaline. It was thudding, the pulse of it in my ears, like the hooves of a tiny, angry horse.

  ‘People you hang out with at vet school?’ my mother queried.

  But I didn’t want to tell her more precisely than that. My mother had a sweetness about her, a kind of faith. She had something, anyway, that I’d already lost. And I didn’t want to distress her with images of small animals laid out stiff on a dissecting table. It was Sunday afternoon, and we were going home to eat tea, and tea was going to be what we usually had on Sundays: bread and cheese and crisps and vinegary beetroot and halved boiled eggs and slices of ham. It was not going to be Thai fishcakes and bottles of beer, it was going to be high tea, with cold cuts.

  3

  The thing about Ed McRae was, he had been an artist. Well, he’d been going to study architecture, but really he’d been an artist. He’d had a light, quick way of talking suggestive of spiritual wealth and material poverty. In the winter he’d used to wear fingerless gloves, and I imagined this was so he could carry on painting, even in the snow. I also thought he swigged Irn-Bru at lunch breaks because Irn-Bru was what he’d been brought up with – not because he was making some sort of ironic statement about the class system. That was one of the first mistakes I made about him.

  We used to sit together in art lessons. Our surnames were next to each other in the register; it was never anything to do with destiny. Ed’s drawings were very stark and intense, and he kept them in a transparent portfolio which had the words ‘Naked Art’ written across it. I didn’t know what to make of that portfolio. I’d always just carried my pictures around in a black plastic thing which had been impossible to get the stretch of my arm around, and which had buckled shut with a snap. My mother had bought it for me in WH Smith’s when I was fourteen. And there was just no comparison, really; already there was no point of comparison in our lives. You could see straight through Ed’s portfolio to the perfect pictures it contained: it was like looking at the beating heart of a transparent little fish. It made me think of the fishes residing in a small, lugubrious aquatics shop near our house, called The Age of Aquarius. My own drawings were more colourful than Ed’s, but they were not so accurate, or so nakedly displayed. I was just doing art, really, because I liked drawing pictures. That was all it had ever been about for me. Only now, of course, there was also the thrill of Ed McRae sitting beside me every Monday and Thursday, behind a row of castor-oil plants, in a building called the Arts Block.

  ‘Hi,’ Ed used to say when he arrived, always a little late, scrunching his long legs beneath the bench we shared.

  ‘Hi,’ I replied in a voice so casual it was almost inaudible.

  ‘So, how’s it going?’

  ‘Yeah: fine.’

  I was never sure what to say after that. A kind of haze descended. I would return to whatever it was I was drawing – some smudged charcoal picture of the view through the window; some big, wobbly still life in chalk, of the castor-oil plants. And I felt transparent, light as air, as if I might float up and out through the window into the sky. I liked feeling like that, though: it was when I was happiest. Above the classroom doorway, presiding like one of God’s commandments, was a bare white poster displaying a quote by Henri Matisse. It said: I wouldn’t mind turning into a vermillion goldfish. I wasn’t sure what this was supposed to mean, but the fact that it had been stuck there like a totally sane statement made me happy.

  ‘Got anything planned for the weekend?’ Ed would ask me sometimes, expertly framing that week’s tableau with his pencil, first vertically, then horizontally – and the normal functioning of my mind would go into a kind of freefall. I would feel myself gasping for breath.

  ‘Yeah: you know, bits and pieces,’ I would mumble. ‘Might meet up with Stella or something on Saturday.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Stella Muir.’

  ‘Oh yeah. Cool.’

  ‘Yeah.’

  And that was pretty much the extent of what I would say to him. Apart from something like, ‘Could you pass me that craft knife, please?’ Or: ‘Have you got any green ink left?’

  ‘Sure,’ he’d reply, whizzing it across the table to me.

  *

  On art afternoons, Ed had nearly always worn a T-shirt that said Life’s a Bitch and Then You Die. It was as if he
had Life worked out: as if he already knew all its ironies. Even Death didn’t seem too big a deal, to Ed McRae. He used to wear the T-shirt under his coat, which he kept buttoned up and only took off when he arrived in the classroom. Mr Carter turned a blind eye to it, preferring the truisms that were Blu-tacked to the walls:

  Art is not what you see, but what you make others see.

  Edgar Degas

  To be an artist is to believe in life.

  Henry Moore

  Seen that attitude before, pal, Mr Carter looked as if he was thinking when he peered at Ed’s T-shirt. You don’t know how many times I’ve clocked smart-arses like you.

  But I hadn’t seen that attitude before. Ed’s T-shirt, to me, had just seemed funny. Funny and fresh and strange, like the sentence about the vermillion fish. Life’s a Bitch and Then You Die! Of course! It had struck me as so funny one afternoon, in fact, that it emboldened me to talk properly to Ed for the first time: it reminded me, I said, as we were walking together out of school and along the pavement – it just reminded me of something I’d read in history a few days earlier.

  ‘Oh yeah?’

  Yes: it was just something. That made me think of it.

  ‘We were looking at famous last words, you see,’ I’d continued, feeling myself blushing, ‘and we came across this thing William Pitt the Younger was supposed to have . . .’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Pitt the Younger . . . what he was supposed to have . . .’

  ‘Oh yeah?’

  ‘Yes.’ I had to go on, now. ‘Yeah, the very last thing he said, apparently, as he lay on his deathbed . . .’

  ‘Which was?’ Ed asked.

  ‘“I think I could eat one of Bellamy’s veal pies,”’ I informed him, hearing my voice clanking, loud and ridiculous, from my mouth. I looked down at the pavement – a slate-grey, potholed expanse undermined by tree roots. ‘That’s what he was supposed to have said, anyway,’ I ploughed on, feeling the colour developing in my cheeks. “I think I could eat one of Bellamy’s veal pies” . . . And then he just . . .’

  I paused, aware of him staring.

  ‘. . . died,’ I concluded.

  Ed was silent.

  ‘Nice one,’ he said after a moment.

  ‘Yeah.’ I couldn’t think of anything worse.

  ‘Cool. So. Anyway. Better get going.’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘My mum wants me to walk the dog this afternoon.’

  ‘Right.’

  And, without saying another word, Ed turned and walked away – he practically bounded, ran! – and then he disappeared around the corner of the road, and that was it. That was that. Life’s a Bitch, I thought, and Then You Die. Which was absolutely correct.

  But what happens, I’d wondered, when you don’t die? Dying might have been an answer, but it was not an option.

  For the rest of that term, in art, I’d sat beneath a new poster that someone had stuck, belatedly, to the wall.

  Ars Longa, Vita Brevis.

  Though it seemed to me that it might be the other way round. Maybe life was going to be long, and art was going to be short. I’d been perfectly happy, once, sitting there drawing a plant or a bird or a bowl of fruit. But now I couldn’t concentrate. I sat very quietly, in the presence of Ed McRae, and tried not to breathe in the fumes of fixative and turpentine. I tried not to breathe too much at all.

  *

  I discovered later that a lot of what I’d imagined about Ed McRae was not quite true. For instance, he was not impoverished. He lived in a big house in one of the nicest parts of town. People didn’t habitually drink Irn-Bru there, or wear T-shirts with ironic slogans on them. They lived there discreetly, charmingly, mysteriously, as if they were the occupants of some enchanted land. It had, I supposed, something to do with wealth. With the easy trappings of it. The McRaes and their semi-​detached neighbours all seemed to have at least two cars, and garages to park them in. They all had stained-glass panels in their vestibule windows and subtly blinking burglar alarms. There were no old sweetie wrappers on the pavements, or crisp packets or squashed cans of Lilt, such as could be seen on the pavements around our house. There were no billboards advertising chocolate bars and the latest blockbusters. The front gardens all seemed to contain the same colour of gravel and the same kinds of bench and terracotta flower tub. Little birds hopped obediently about the driveways and sang from the branches of the laurel and rhododendron trees. Everything was calm, ordered, expansive. Even the McRaes’ dog kennel was the size, practically, of our front porch! And their living room was so large that all the furniture just seemed to disappear into it, somehow, like space debris entering a black hole. I discovered this when I went to a party Ed held there at the end of that winter term – because I had made it, amazingly, despite my Bellamy’s veal pie comment – onto his invitation list. It was a New Year’s Eve party, and I had arrived; and as soon as I had arrived it was clear, from the number of people there, and the number of rooms in his house, that I was simply one of the multitude. Ed’s parents and younger brother were away at some skiing lodge in Fort William, and he had secretly invited half the people in our year – ‘a bus-load of folk’, he’d said – to see in the bells. There was nothing significant about my having been one of the bus-load. I did go there on the bus, although the rest of the bus-load seemed to have been driven there in their parents’ cars. I’d spent hours getting ready that evening, applying lip gloss ‘for kissable lips’ and adjusting the belt of my dress so it sat at the right, cowgirl-ish slant on my hips. It was a dark-blue shirt-dress with little pearlised buttons that Stella had insisted Ed would find irresistible.

  ‘He’ll think you’re gorgeous in that,’ she’d said.

  Although when I got there he was nowhere to be seen. And how could he think I was gorgeous or resist the buttons on my dress if he wasn’t even there?

  I spent most of the party standing in the kitchen with a boy called Craig Dillard. Craig was in my geography class at school: he was studying geography, like me, and he was going to carry on studying it at university. And everything about geography, that night, had suddenly seemed extremely unappealing.

  ‘I’m going over land erosion,’ I remember Craig saying, quite early on in our conversation.

  ‘What?’ I asked, clutching onto the enormous glass of red wine I’d poured for myself on arriving.

  ‘I’m going over land erosion,’ he said again.

  He was tall and thin, Craig, and there was nothing wrong with that; it was just that he kept looming in too close. His eyes were intense, blurry things, like overripe blackberries, and they had a way of boring humourlessly into you. I kept having to look away for light relief. I remember peering up at the frieze stuck around the top of the kitchen wall – a cheerful repeating pattern of lemons – and also at an enormous clock above our heads. It was like a clock you might have found on a Paris railway platform circa 1937, except there was nothing romantic about this one. Its hands just clunked slow and inevitable around the dial.

  ‘Have you revised land erosion yet?’ Craig persisted.

  I gulped some more wine from the glass I was holding and wondered where Ed was. My heart already felt full of his absence. I was in love, that was the problem. I got here at nine, I thought, peering up again at the clock, I got here at nine, and it’s still not even ten. And already I had drunk too much. I was aware, standing beneath Craig’s stooping figure, of movement and colour at the edges of my vision, and of a jumbled clatter of words falling without meaning into my ears. He was saying something now about basalt. About basalt and granite and limestone quarries. About quartz. About pearlite. I thought about the buttons on my dress. And where was Ed? Where was the host of this party? There were a lot of dark rooms off the hallway with the scent of cigarettes emerging from them and the sound of music and low conversation, and I felt as if I was standing in the wrong house; a house that was never supposed to have me in it as a guest. It was impossible to make out who was in those rooms, so I re
mained in the kitchen which was at least reassuring – being a kitchen – despite having Craig Dillard in it.

  ‘Za’ clock uppair ackerchy working?’ I asked, my heart a lead weight of disappointment.

  Craig didn’t reply. He just stared, as if mesmerised.

  Now I wondered if the red wine had coloured my lips. They often went a kind of burgundy colour if I had not applied enough lipstick. Or lip gloss – if I had not put on enough lip gloss that evening. My lips went like that in the winter. Maybe that was why Craig was looking at them. Nothing did appear to be wrong with the clock, in any case; it was probably, I felt, more likely that something was wrong with me. Or possibly with Time: maybe Time, that evening, had developed a strange, elastic quality. It had begun to seem like a lost weekend now, the party at Ed McRae’s house, a kind of timeless cave. I felt like Persephone, having eaten the pomegranate seeds and unable to find her way back out. I swayed and swigged wine and listened to Craig talking about pearlite and put my hand by accident onto a hot slice of pizza that someone had put down on the kitchen table.

  ‘You all right?’ asked Craig, his face looming in with concern.

  ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘I’m fine’ – although I had in fact scalded my hand quite badly, I realised; on the fleshy part of it, beneath the knuckle of my little finger.

  ‘Want to run it under a tap?’

  ‘No thanks,’ I said, dabbing tomato sauce off my palm onto the edge of Mrs McRae’s tablecloth. Because I was determined, for some reason, to stay exactly where I was. I felt that if I did that, nothing too bad would happen.

  ‘So, what universities are you putting on your UCCA form?’ Craig asked after a moment’s pause, as the minute hand of the clock moved slowly, slowly towards the number seven.