by Tessa Hadley
—I didn’t say anything. She hung up.
—It’s better if she doesn’t know Naomi’s here for the moment.
—Shouldn’t I wake her? said Clare. Wouldn’t she want us to?
Marian shrugged. You can try. I’ll make a pot of tea.
Toby followed Clare up the stairs. Halfway up, on the little landing, she turned and clutched his arms and looked desperately into his face.
—Oh, Toby, my life’s such a mess—has Tamsin told you? Bram and I have separated, and I’m living here, and I go there to look after the children on weekends. I haven’t managed to sort out anything else yet, because I’m so miserable, everything’s more hideous and horrible than I ever could have imagined.
—Separated? Toby felt himself blushing; he wasn’t used to Clare’s taking much notice of him, she could be condescending and overbearing. I don’t believe it.
Her face distorted in a silent ugly spasm, her nose and eyes reddened, and her cheeks were wet with tears.
—I know. But I can’t talk about it now.
—But you and Bram—
—No, she said, wiping her face on her sleeve resolutely and continuing up the stairs. Not now. We’ve got to go and wake up Naomi.
He stepped through the spare-room door into the thick familiar soup of his mother’s smells: incense and aromatherapy oils and sweat and drink, the warning smell of drink, rich as Christmas pudding. Naomi was snoring; she was a mound under a duvet with only a swirl of black hair showing on the pillow: when Clare switched on a bedside lamp whose shade was swathed in a purple silk shawl, the mound snorted and protested and a hand tweaked the duvet protectively over her oblivion. He would have known it was his mother’s room even if she hadn’t been in it because every surface of Marian’s sensible spare-room furniture was laden with Naomi’s intimate clutter: bangles and rainbow candles and perfume bottles and scarves; a stone painted with Inuit designs; a Victorian coffee cup with a gold rim and no saucer; paperback books with pages furry and splayed and turned down.
Clare sat down on the bed beside the mound.
—Naomi, she called. Wake up! Look who’s here, who’s come back. It’s Toby!
The mound didn’t stir. Clare looked at Toby. She’s been drinking a lot, she whispered. There’ve been terrible things with Angie. It’s like the other times. She picked up an empty wine bottle from the floor. She brought this up to bed half full. And she’d already had most of another bottle.
Toby nodded. He crouched down beside where the mound’s head must be.
—Mum? Are you in there? It’s me.
—Toby? There was a disturbance under the duvet, and then came the thickened false wooden voice that always seemed to him to be his mother’s counterpart to the ugly little anxiety manikin that sat in his chest. What are you doing here?
—I’ve come home.
—Where’ve you been?
—Oh, you know, all round India, and then Nepal. I flew from Nepal the day before yesterday.
Naomi pushed back the duvet and then heaved herself around and up onto her pillows, frowning in concentration as if she were balancing something heavy and slippery that rolled inside her. Her makeup was smeared under her eyes like ashes; her skin had erupted across her cheekbones in a brick-colored rash. She had gone to sleep in dangling earrings, one of which was twisted back to front, and a black satiny slip whose border cut like a band across one bulging breast exposed almost to the dark nipple. Clare tugged up her petticoat strap until she was decent.
—Did they tell you I wasn’t feeling too good tonight? Do you know about what happened with Angie?
—They told me something.
—I fouled up again.
—It wasn’t you, Mum.
—Marian’s so kind. I’m such a nuisance.
—That’s not what anybody thinks, said Clare.
—I’ve let everybody down again. I’ve let Toby down. I didn’t want him to come back to this.
When his mother had been drinking, Toby always felt as if he was in contact with a simulacrum, a mere unsatisfactory representative of her real self. She didn’t look quite like the real Naomi; she sounded louder, as though her volume control knob had been cavalierly twisted up at some interior party. Her thoughts were pretend thoughts, her emotions were ones an impersonator might have guessed at and acted. This simulacrum must be soothed and propitiated but at the same time ruthlessly shut out; he was expert at this deception.
—Now I’m home, he said, everything’ll be fine. I’ll be able to look after you.
—Clare’s got troubles of her own, she said. She doesn’t want to be bothered with me.
—Don’t be silly, said Clare. We’re both in the same boat.
—I’ve got a good son, haven’t I? He’s a good boy. I must have done something right.
—You haven’t done anything wrong, said Toby.
* * *
MARIAN IN dressing gown and slippers made up a bed for Toby in the dawn light.
Clare had offered to sleep on the mattress in Tamsin’s room so that Toby could have the sofa bed in the study.
—No fear, said Tamsin. I’d never get any sleep, holed up next to the fountain of eternal sorrow. Toby can come in with me. It’ll be like the old days.
—I suppose it’s all right, said Marian.
—Oh, for God’s sake, Mum.
When Tamsin and Toby were little they had shared a bedroom for several years in the house in Kingsmile where their father lived then with Naomi. (Tamsin and Clare used to go to Marian’s on weekends.) Their room was a wild place at the very top of the four-story skinny Georgian house: painted white, bare of furniture except their mattresses on the floor, out of earshot of the adult life that washed around in the rooms downstairs. They developed an elaborate ritual of games and magics and taboos that no one outside the room knew much about: invisible uncrossable lines on the floor divided up their space, in the ceiling that came down at odd angles under the roof there were lucky cracks to touch, there was a cursed corner with a dirty broken baseboard they must not even look into. Whatever lived and groaned up behind the ornate cast-iron flap that closed off the chimney from the little empty fireplace must be propitiated with offerings stolen from downstairs: currants, dry pasta, lentils, salt. Certain games must be played at certain times of day or year or on particular occasions. They had a torture game where one of them thought of a secret and the other one had to try and persuade the first one to tell, by rubbing strong toothpaste onto the tongue, say, or giving Chinese burns, or eating chocolate without offering any. Clare was sometimes allowed to join in this one but she went too fast and hurt too much too quickly, not appreciating the point of the long-drawn-out exquisite contest of endurance. Some games were self-consciously childlike, too young for them, commemorative of previous phases of their lives: a game of trains, for instance, played ritually on the day that guests departed.
There was a game for when there was a grown-up dinner party on downstairs. Tamsin and Toby would get into the same bed, sitting up with the sheet draped over their heads like a tent, and in a mixture of telling and acting and urgent sotto voce planning, they went through adventures featuring Han Solo and Luke Sky-walker against the evil amphibian Mr. Beale, who led an army of seals. Tamsin and Toby were not Han Solo or Luke Skywalker themselves, they were only involved with them; Tamsin tended and consoled them when they were injured, crooning to them and stroking their invisible faces. If the party downstairs was a full-blown party, things got crazy; Clare joined in too and any other children who were staying over. They would barricade off the top floor with mattresses across the top of the stairs; they sent foraging parties down to spy on the grown-ups, to return with reports on who was drunk, who was dancing, who was kissing, who was quarreling or crying. They brought back stolen food and drink. They kept guard, with a system of Red Alerts to warn of any adults advancing too far up the stairs. The sense of immediate infinite possibilities snatched the breath out of their lungs, infected them with a
heady energy they didn’t know what to do with, so they screamed and ran about and threw themselves onto the beds and on top of each other, panting; they stole makeup and clothes and dressed up, boys and girls, and danced and sang in lurid mockery of their parents down below, waggling their hips and rolling their eyes. Children from nice quiet homes whose parents didn’t let them do things went craziest. It was they who dragged mattresses, who drank vodka. Clare and Tamsin and Toby would watch them (there was no need to encourage them) with a certain satisfaction, as if this wildness that lay just under the calm surface of life was something all children ought to be initiated into, for their own safety.
* * *
IN HIS DREAMS he was afloat on sheets, laundered and ironed into neat rectangles, wafting their perfume of washing powder. They flew out under him as they had flown out across the room under Marian’s proficient hands, like big birds balanced on currents of air.
He woke up hungry, to the smell of cooking.
For the first few days in the house at Besteaston the ordinary sensations of physical comfort—the sheets, the hot shower, the clean clothes, the central heating, the home-cooked food—were almost too much, as if his capacity for them had shrunk while he was on his travels: they made him drunk and muddled.
Tamsin wandered into the room wearing the ginger cat round her neck like a boa and eating a toasted sandwich; she sat cross-legged on her bed, which was neatly made even though she was still in her pajamas. (The whole room was neat, apart from him on his mattress: Tamsin, whose teenage floor had been uncrossably deep in dirty clothes and overflowing ashtrays and coffee cups growing mold, had had a Damascus Road conversion to cleanliness a few years ago, when she came back to Marian from living in her squat.)
—So what happened? she said.
—How do you mean, what happened?
—In India, stupid. On second thought, don’t tell me. It’ll be all the predictable spirituality-materialism, roadside-pickles, music and flowers, poverty-dysentery stuff.
—I didn’t get dysentery.
—That’s one thing then.
—I’ve taken loads of photos.
—Predictably. Luckily you won’t be able to afford to develop them. “This is an American girl I met, standing in front of a Hindu temple. This was Sanjay, our guide round the ruins of the ranee’s tomb.”
—Actually, something did happen.
Tamsin had just taken a big bite of sandwich; she narrowed her eyes suspiciously at him while she finished her mouthful. Oh, no. You found a guru. You saw through to the meaning of life.
—Not that kind of thing. I don’t know if I should tell you. I don’t want Mum to know. I don’t want anyone else to know, really. Just because there’s no point in anyone worrying about it.
—You’ve got AIDS.
He shook his head. An accident.
—What kind of accident?
—In a car.
—What were you doing in a car?
—We hired one. We were going to do some trekking in the Annapurnas.
—Who’s we?
—Me and some girls I met at the hostel in Kathmandu. Three girls, Dutch girls. I’d only met them the day before: they had the whole trip planned out; they had food and maps and toilet paper and everything. (Actually, toilet paper’s not much use, it’s better just to use snow.) They said I could come along, there was a space in the car.
—Did you sleep with any of them?
Toby blushed deeply scarlet. It’s not that.
—Too ugly?
—No. I mean, not particularly, that wasn’t the reason why. They weren’t those kind of girls.
—You bet, said Tamsin. They’re always those kind of girls, only you don’t notice. So, go on.
—We hired a car, Toby said. It looked all right. You couldn’t hire a car without a Nepalese driver. I think hiring a car was a mistake: most people get the buses, but one of the girls had sort of fixed on this, this girl called Bregje. She was mad enough that they wouldn’t let her drive. We’d hardly gone any way, we were about twenty miles outside the city, on the Pokhara road where it’s quite flat and runs beside a river. The car hit something in the road, a stone or something, which was ironic considering it was the only road in Nepal I ever went on that was surfaced and didn’t have too many potholes. But the car just—well, the axle snapped, I think. That’s what the man said, the one who was driving. Except his English wasn’t very good. The girls said it was his fault, they were going to try to prosecute him, they said the vehicle was unfit and all this stuff, they got kind of obsessed with getting justice, they kept arguing with the police and everything, and the Dutch consulate, and they got involved with this dodgy lawyer. But you know, the car looked all right but it didn’t look that good, they just don’t have the kind of checks we have over here, or the regulations, everything’s just different, you know?
—So was anyone hurt?
—There was this big crunch when we hit the stone, then the car skidded along and hit a post at the side of the road—maybe it had been a road sign once but now it was just a gray painted metal post, doing nothing—and it spun round and stopped. And you could see one of the wheels rolling off in another direction. It wasn’t really all that terrible, we weren’t going very fast, there wasn’t much other traffic. The girls were screaming, but I thought we’d be OK. One of the ones in the back next to me hurt her shoulder, the other one cut her lip where she hit the seat in front. I was all right. The girl in the front passenger seat looked as if she had passed out. I wanted to get her out of the way because the car had sort of twisted across and the front of it was sticking out into the road, and the driver had jumped out and was trying to look at the engine, for some reason. I managed to get her out of the car and carry her to the side of the road, she opened her eyes, I sort of laid her down and kept holding her hand and told her she was going to be all right. The other girls were trying to call somebody on their mobile phone, one of them was crying because her shoulder hurt, the driver was climbing under the front of the car, where it was propped up on one wheel. While the others were still calling—they couldn’t get a signal—she died.
—Just like that.
—Just like that. She was gripping my hand and then she just let go. It was so strange; it really hadn’t been such a terrible accident. It all seemed quite ordinary and calm, the others didn’t even realize what was going on, they were still trying to get through on their phone. It turned out she had broken her neck, but I still don’t know how. You try and remember what happened, but it all seemed quite sedate, the other girls were screaming but until the last minute she was still trying to grab the steering wheel from the driver and pull it round, I remember her shouting something angrily in Dutch, probably swearing, and the driver was probably swearing in Nepali too. It was quite funny really.
—Next minute she was dead.
—The trouble was I didn’t particularly like her. Out of the three of them, she was the one I didn’t like. She was bossy, kind of unfriendly in the way she said things, I don’t think she’d really wanted me to come along. She was a big girl, there was something about her that sort of spilled over as if she was unhappy with herself. She had a really pale face and her writing was huge. You know those people who do circles to dot their i’s and take up two lines for a single line of writing? She was the one who’d made all the lists for the trekking.
—Ugly people die too.
—She’d made some big scene the night before, sulking and stomping off to bed early, because the others thought she was planning for them to walk too far every day. That’s what she was like; you could tell she put everything into planning some great future project all the time, and always overdid it, and then she’d be the first to be groaning and complaining when things went wrong.
—Only not this time. Sounds like good riddance to me. One less fat monster abroad, making everyone’s lives miserable.
—So it was strange that it was my hand she was holding, when it happened.
* * *
IN THE MORNINGS Clare went out early to go home and help her husband get their children ready for school, and Marian went to work (she was a teacher). Naomi had a new job at the box office in the theater. She didn’t have to start until ten o’clock, and she wasn’t drinking every night, especially now Toby was home. Even after a bad night she could still just about manage to pull herself back together in the morning. She showered and washed her hair and appeared downstairs looking fragile and pretty and with only—as Tamsin put it—a faintly piquant aura of abuse, the purple crescents under the eyes, the etched lines beside the nostrils, a patch of angry skin between her eyebrows, hands that shook as she reached out for her mug of coffee.
—You can be sure, Tamsin also said, that the next sadist has already sniffed her out and is halfway to convincing her he’s the one to save her from herself. Let’s just hope he’s a man, for God’s sake, and heterosexual. At least then we’ll know where we are. I loathe lesbians. I’m praying she doesn’t try to start anything with Mum.
—Don’t be ridiculous, said Toby. You are ridiculous.
—You know how she works. “I’m such a failure! Everything I touch comes to no good! I’m just too trustful, the people I get involved with always seem so sweet at first; I’m so hopeless at seeing through them.” I mean, she’s so right: but Mum’s a complete sucker for that stuff. And now we’ve got Clare too: “I’ve made such a mess! I’m such a failure! I’m so selfish: I wrecked my relationship, I’ve damaged my children.”
Toby didn’t take offense when Tamsin insulted Naomi. All his earliest memories had Tamsin in them. He seemed to have always known that Naomi was his mother and that the girls had a separate mother somewhere else, but in his family memories from childhood it was Tamsin whom Naomi was mostly preoccupied with: Tamsin screaming and kicking and (her specialty) banging her head against the floor, Tamsin refusing to go to the play park, Tamsin refusing to eat anything except cream crackers and peanut butter, Tamsin waking up with nightmares, Tamsin cutting vengeful slits in the sitting room curtains with scissors after she was told off for something, Tamsin wetting the bed. He remembered that during these scenes Clare would frown and put her fingers in her ears and read her book; he wondered what he’d done. Perhaps he watched. He had somehow known from his mother that they must put up with this; they must hold off from one another because they owed something to the girls, something they couldn’t do enough to make up for.
