by Amanda Craig
‘I think I should get back, now it’s dark.’
Di insists on driving her home, though the girls are reluctant to leave.
‘Will your boys be OK on their own here?’ Lottie asks.
‘Oh, yes. I’ll get Janet to pop in.’
‘She’s all right to look after them, is she?’
Di laughs. ‘Well, she’s a bit odd, but she’s been our housekeeper since the boys were little. She’s had a hard life but she looks after the house and dog when we’re on holiday, totally reliable.’ She gives Lottie a searching look. ‘You won’t talk to your husband about this, will you? Seeing as he’s a journalist.’
‘No, of course. Besides, we’re hardly together any more.’
‘I understand. Thanks for the reassurance.’
‘Thanks for the wine, and company.’
‘No worries. It’s great you’ve moved in. I hope you’ll come again. I think the kids have …’
‘Buried the hatchet?’ They both laugh, and make a face. ‘Yes.’
‘See you again. It’s a long way round by the road, but you can go from ours to yours in about fifteen minutes if you go by the river. It’s a lovely walk in summer.’
When they get back, Lottie is glad to see Quentin has (predictably) left all the lights on, and the curtains open. For once, it looks bright and cosy. Surely every old house has had someone die in it? She’s no more frightened of a house being haunted than a surgeon is of ghosts.
Yet when the wind howls she can often hear another voice joining in: high, inhuman and full of grief. It’s the voice, she is quite sure, of Randall’s dog, calling for its dead master.
11
Why Bother?
Xan had always supposed that, sooner or later, he would get a girlfriend, though how this would ever happen mystified him, even before his family left London. Here, it’s as if everyone normal in the country has been abducted by aliens, leaving only the very young, the very old, and weirdos like Dawn.
He can’t help being interested in Dawn, partly because she’s his own age, partly because of her musical gift and partly because, underneath the fat that has overwhelmed her, she is pretty. Her features are delicate and regular, and although her hair is very blonde she has dark brows and lashes. If she still had cheekbones, and no double chin, she’d probably be stunning.
One thing he noticed from the start, when she took off her puffy pink anorak, is that she has thin white lines laddering her forearms. He knows what these mean: at some point, she’s been depressed enough to cut herself. He’s seen it on other girls, cutting being the new anorexia, but it makes him pity her more. Maybe she was bullied at school – that might explain why she dropped out.
‘Are you OK?’ he always asks. The reticence they both have about talking in the factory falls away at home.
‘I don’t know. I’m so tired all the time.’
‘Do you have to do night shifts?’
‘Yes.’ She seems sunk in herself, yet dimly alarmed.
‘Maybe go to your doctor.’
‘Mum doesn’t like doctors. She doesn’t believe in them.’
Janet, Xan thinks, is both overprotective and domineering. She talks to Dawn as if she were still a child, and drops her off at the factory after her cleaning for the night shift (though she never offers Xan a lift) and picks her up again in the morning. Surely, Dawn might get a scooter or something instead? He can’t help feeling sorry for her. Bundled up in thick sweatshirts and jeans, it’s hard to tell just how fat she is, but he can tell her waist and breasts are humongous. Once, he sees Janet giving her a little white pill from a brown plastic bottle in her pocket.
‘There you go, my poppet.’
‘More,’ Dawn said.
‘No more. That’s the dose.’
When Janet was vacuuming at the other end of the house, the door shut, Xan asked, ‘Are you sick?’
‘Yes,’ Dawn said.
‘I’m sorry.’
Dawn turned her blank blue gaze onto him. ‘You are kind.’
He looked at her enquiringly, and suddenly she blushed, a colour that swept over her pale face, so that she turned away. Xan had never seen a girl do this before, and felt confused. She couldn’t fancy him, could she? He knows he’s looking fitter than before, from all the cycling, but poor Dawn … He’d sooner fancy a seal.
‘You helped me when that man was assaulting me.’
‘Rod.’
‘Do you know him?’
‘He’s Mum’s …’ She stopped, and fell silent.
‘I thought he might be some kind of weird gay. Not that I’ve got anything against gays.’
Dawn said nothing. He wondered if this man Rod was round at Janet’s a lot. That hot, hungry glare wasn’t one he’d like to have fixed on any teenage girl.
He said,
‘Do you want to play again?’
‘Yes.’
Dawn was always drawn to the piano, and he was consistently surprised by her ability: not only Bach, but Chopin, Ravel, Debussy, pieces he knew were challenging; only she played them far better than he ever did, by heart. She was like some great, waddling bird which, the moment it is on the water, is all power and grace, in its natural element. Yet he noticed something else. As soon as the Dyson stopped, so did she. If Janet came near the living room, she would heave herself off the stool and subside back on the sofa as if she had never left it.
From this, Xan surmised that Dawn was intimidated by her mother, and despite her talent, not supposed to play. He couldn’t understand how she could seem so stupid, yet be so musical. It was a mystery which puzzled him, but which he soon forgot.
Within a week of starting at the factory, Katya had taken him back to the tiny house in Trelorn she shared with six other girls, where they had energetic sex on her single bed. Even now, Xan can’t believe the calm, smiling manner in which she first placed his trembling hand on one of her breasts. It felt fantastic, and there were two of them.
‘You like?’
‘Er – yes.’
She put her hand on the zipper of his jeans, laughed, and said, ‘You want sex?’
‘Yes.’
He followed her upstairs, hardly able to make his knees bend. Her bedroom is shared with two others, though the room was empty. He could hear her friends giggling in the kitchen below, until someone turned up the radio.
It was nothing like what he’d been led to believe. His generation has grown up with online pornography, largely because their parents were too innocent to realise what could be seen, and so sex felt like the secret his generation had discovered. At eighteen, Xan has seen more weird things involving men and women than his forefathers had probably ever dreamt of. Yet the feel of Katya, the smell of her, the taste, the touch, the movements are all startlingly different. He feels less like a child who has become an adult than an adult who has become a child: delighted, frightened, curious and unable to think about much else.
Since then, he has spent almost every day with her. Katya doesn’t seem to mind, and neither do her housemates. The person who does is Lottie.
When he switched on his mobile after the first day together, he saw he’d missed about twenty messages and calls from her.
Irritated, he texted back, ‘I’m ALIVE.’
She rang back, instantly.
‘Thank God. Where are you?’
‘I’m with a friend in Trelorn,’ he said, and Katya chose that moment to giggle.
‘Oh.’ There was a pause, as she digested this. ‘Well – take care.’
She’s still upset, though, when he returns two days later for a change of clothes and a toothbrush.
‘I thought you must be lying dead in a ditch after being knocked off your bike.’
‘It’s OK, Mum,’ Xan says, irritably. ‘I’m just, like, having a normal time, with some normal people.’
It isn’t normal, though, because Katya could have anyone.
‘I like you because you are different,’ she said, adding, ‘Your skin is di
fferent.’
Normally, Xan would have been exasperated by this. His skin is his skin, he’s comfortable in it, but it’s different for Poles, apparently.
‘So smooth,’ she says, stroking him. ‘No hair.’
She is a year older than him; both shrewd and experienced.
‘Do you live here always?’
‘I should be going to university next year,’ he tells her. ‘To read English.’
‘Can’t you read English already?’
She’s genuinely puzzled about this, and the more he explains the more doubtful he becomes himself. What is the point of it all, those imaginary people in imaginary situations? Why had they seemed to matter? Surely it was all worthless and fake, whereas to work and be paid is real. His old life, which was supposed to be so privileged and glorious, has already led to humiliation and mortification. A line of Yeats comes back to him, ‘Poetry exists in a valley of its own making/It alters nothing.’ So, why bother?
Why bother with the whole stupid conventional future? He’s never had a choice about what he should do, just done what he was told, and yet university isn’t the only thing in life. What’s the point of more education? Cycling between the factory and Home Farm, he feels a kind of thrill in his new fitness, and the ability to earn money with the labour of his body. All the people he’d grown up with live almost entirely in and on their intellectual capabilities, seeing manual labour as something unpleasant and unrewarding, so much so that his mother is the only person he knows who can even use a screwdriver. He absorbed their attitude, and now he’s seen it isn’t the only way to live. Had he gone straight to uni, or had a gap year, he’d still be the same flabby, unformed boy he was a year ago, trundling along the safe paths laid out by education and expectations, whereas now …
As Christmas approaches, they have to work harder than ever. Xan has never realised before that the Two For One offers in supermarkets, known as BOGOFs, are not in fact caused by the manufacturer deciding to take a hit. They are produced by making people like himself work twice as fast, and by cutting the prices which farmers receive. It’s cripplingly hard to keep up the pace, even though some, like Maddy, are desperate enough to do back-to-back shifts. Every week, she seems to have aged another decade.
‘If I don’t do this, how on earth am I going to give the kids a decent Christmas?’ she says to Xan.
When he finds out what she’s buying for her three young children – the latest gadget that will be broken in days – he’s horrified, especially as she has debts to pay off already. How can someone with so little money do this? But he knows that if he were ever to comment on it, Maddy would take deep offence; and in any case, he might be wrong.
They are all exhausted. Such is the frenzy that different pies get mixed up on the conveyor belt, and then fights break out. There are a couple of Romanians who are just crazy, and they’ll throw pies at each other or anyone who annoys them. Xan can’t help flinching – for a hot pie, straight from the oven, is not a thing you want smashed in your face, but a cold one is also a sticky, slimy mess. But this side of Christmas, nobody gets sacked. All that happens is that Dawn has to shuffle round and clean it up.
‘She used to be the prettiest girl, you know,’ Maddy remarks, following his gaze. ‘Clever, too.’
‘What happened?’
‘Who knows? She and her mum keep themselves to themselves.’
‘Don’t they have any friends?’
‘Not really, unless you count Rod.’ Maddy jerks her head at the man, and Xan grimaces. Rod’s wandering hands have slackened off as far as he’s concerned, but he remains loathsome, a sex pest who nobody dares to denounce. ‘Janet either doesn’t know or doesn’t mind his reputation.’
‘Why is he interested in her?’
It’s a rude question, but he’s curious.
‘With most I’d say sex, but with her it’s probably the housekeeping job at Tore Towers. There’s plenty as would have liked that, what with the salary and the cottage and the car. You ask me, he’s got his eye on that. Unless it’s Dawn. He likes them young, apparently.’
Sometimes, when he’s joking with Katya, Xan sees Dawn looking at them. He almost wonders whether he’s overestimated her ability, but his Oma stuffed him with music almost the moment he was born, and he knows that Dawn played the tiny drop of pure gold that is the Goldberg Aria quite brilliantly. Dawn has got the special touch, the grasp of silence between the notes, that is the difference between a born musician and one who has nothing more than proficiency.
Why does she stare at him? Her face is like that on the moon, so sketchy that she seems to be losing her eyebrows.
‘Why do people care about who works for the Tores?’
‘Aren’t you interested in him?’
‘Um, not really,’ Xan confesses. ‘I know he’s a sort of genius, but …’
‘I expect you’re into garage or whatever it is now, but Tore – well, he’s one of us, only he’s an international celebrity, too. There’s always paparazzi hovering around, trying to bribe people to tell them stories about orgies and drugs. Even though he’s pushing seventy.’
Maddy sniffs, either from disapproval or because she has the bug that is going round.
More and more of the workers at Humbles are falling sick. They complain of fever, sore throats, streaming noses, but Christmas means they still come into the factory, and sneeze or cough over the food going past. Xan can almost see the mucus flying into the meals. He’s never thought about who actually made this stuff, but this factory, and others like it, is where almost all instant meals in England are prepared.
‘Well, what else are you to do with the bits of meat and veg nobody will buy?’ Maddy points out. ‘If shoppers learnt to cook, Humbles would be out of business, only who has the time to peel the bad bits? Not me. By the time I get home I’m like every other woman, too bloody knackered. So I get out my ready meal, and I don’t have to do anything but heat and eat.’
‘Even with snot in it?’
The bosses would be furious if they knew how often, and how deliberately, Health and Safety rules are breached. However, for the workers there is no pride or sense of responsibility, only the fear of losing a trickle of income so small that their wages are all topped up by benefits. Cheating is rife. The tracking documents, called hasps, are always falsified, because to fill them in honestly would mean nobody met their targets. They are a part of the machine, and the machine doesn’t care if somebody gets food poisoning somewhere far away.
Xan soon finds he doesn’t care either. Humbles is the only big employer in Trelorn, and it’s built almost entirely on shoddiness.
‘They wanted to call them Cornish pasties, but they couldn’t, not being Cornish,’ Maddy told him. ‘Devon pasties have to have the crimp on top, not to one side. Anyway, pies have made Humbles a fortune. People like the idea of Devon, see, they think it means the goodness of nature, not people scraping a living.’
Her laugh turns into a cough.
Such is the ill-feeling among many workers that some deliberately put things in, like nail-parings or actual nails, to cause trouble. This happens especially when the immigrants, who have been promised full-time work, discover that they are only given part-time.
‘If I get only four shifts a week, is no worth it, I cannot save enough,’ Katya says angrily. She was recruited six months before Xan, and not being able to earn every day is a nightmare for all of them. However, the immigrants, too, have no bargaining power. They can only save out of their wages because they’re prepared to live in what would be slum conditions if they weren’t so scrupulously clean.
‘British people, they don’t want to work hard like Polish peoples,’ she says. ‘If they do, why so few do this work?’
Xan has lost over a stone as a result of his own labours, and whenever he feels tired, he has only to think of his stepfather to be powered by rage again. He’s proud of giving half his earnings to Lottie, and keeping the other half to spend or save for travell
ing or (if he gets around to applying again) university. He has felt miserable about Cambridge, but Maddy tells him things about her own life that make him feel ashamed of ever feeling sorry for himself, though she treats it as completely normal. If it weren’t for her earnings, they’d be at the food bank, like half of the town.
‘Are you all right?’ Xan asks one night. She looks more and more like a wet hen, her pale face lined.
‘Not really,’ she shouts back.
‘Has something happened?’
‘The health visitor thinks my baby isn’t putting on enough weight.’
‘Oh. Won’t she eat?’
‘She keeps sicking up.’
It sounds disgusting, but then most things to do with babies are. One of the things Xan likes best about Katya’s place is that it’s always crammed with adults, all talking and drinking vodka after a night shift. The men have pale, broad faces and small dark eyes; they can look like angry scones until, suddenly, they smile. They turn their hand to anything: building, joinery, plumbing, electrics, decorating, mechanics. Some are only a year or two older than himself, but beside them, Xan feels like an ignorant child. Most seem to be employed by an especially big Pole called Arek, who is some kind of master-builder; when he enters, everyone falls respectfully silent.
‘He has good business,’ Katya tells Xan, when he asks about Arek. ‘Also, a wife and kids in Poland.’
She says it as if she is giving him important information.
‘That must be hard.’
‘Yes. They see each other once a year when we go home, for Christmas.’
‘Why don’t his children come here?’
‘The schools in Poland are better. Here, there is no discipline.’
It’s true that the Poles have an almost military sense of how to behave. The tiny, shabby house in Trelorn, though always crammed with shoes in its narrow hall, smells of bleach. Every evening they cook, and three times a week they bake bread, a dark heavy substance that is plaited or twisted into something that tastes completely wonderful.
‘Why me?’ he asks, eventually.
‘I see you nice English boy, and I think – I like him.’
