After Everything

by Suellen Dainty

  On the road below him, a car skidded into a telegraph pole and crumpled as the car behind smashed into it. He watched the pile-up grow until it was almost the length of the block. He could go down to the bar, have a drink, sit for a while. Something was always happening in a bar in a big hotel. But he would have to talk and make some kind of effort. And he would have to get dressed. He re-tied the belt on his bathrobe. He didn’t want to get dressed. He didn’t want to make an effort. He walked over to the desk, picked up the telephone and rang down to the concierge.

  This was one of the few efficient things about Moscow, Jeremy thought as he heard the tentative knock on the door. He paused before opening it. He could just sit there, not get up. The knocking would stop after a while. He could muster what his mother used to call self-control and let the moment pass. But he knew it wasn’t a moment. It was a sick addiction that lay sleeping for months until he thought it had gone away, before returning to seduce him again.

  Sandy was the only person who suspected it might be something more than a preference for young women. He’d come to the Jezebel for coffee one morning, earlier than arranged, and saw one of them leaving. ‘Jesus Christ,’ he’d said. ‘A bit young, even for you. How old is she? She looks just a kid.’ Jeremy had said she was twenty, but Sandy didn’t believe him. The girl had told Jeremy she was sixteen, but he knew she was lying. He’d picked her up at the usual place the night before.

  There was that other time, when he and Sandy were both profligately single. In an unguarded moment, he’d sent Sandy an email with a picture of a naked prepubescent girl, legs splayed. He’d explained it away by saying someone had sent it to him, and he’d forwarded it by mistake, instead of deleting it. ‘You need to get things in check,’ said Sandy.

  ‘You’re a fine one to talk,’ snapped Jeremy. He knew Sandy wouldn’t mention it again, to him or the others. Sandy was like that; loyal, always thinking the best of people. Little Mr Sunshine with his perfect note moments bubbling up under the wry chat. Where had that got him?

  There was another knock on the door. Jeremy ushered the girl into the room. She said her name was Natasha, but he didn’t care. She stank of cheap scent. Her dark hair was scraped into a ponytail and she wore a fake leather jacket over a cropped T-shirt. In the dim light, he saw her bad skin under the thick makeup, her crooked teeth, her slightly bandy legs under the black miniskirt and the scuffed stilettos. If he was a cliché of a jaundiced Western businessmen exploiting an under-age girl, she was the cliché of a post-millennium Moscow child hooker. He would have preferred someone prettier, but she would do.

  Just before he motioned for her to take her clothes off, he felt faint. He might just pay her and tell her to go. But by then she had turned around. He saw her bud-like breasts, the faint outline of her ribs, the thin whorls of pubic hair and her shy brave smile that asked, ‘Do you like me? Am I pretty enough?’ He led her to the bed, laid her down and turned her over.

  Chapter 16

  The matron had been firm. Visiting hours were from 4 to 5 pm. There was a pause before she hung up. Standing in the public telephone box at Waterloo, cursing his dead mobile and straining to hear above the loudspeakers, Sandy understood what the pause signified. If he had visited his mother regularly, he would be aware of the visiting hours.

  At Woking station, waiting for the bus to Mayfield House, he knew there was no excuse for not visiting his mother for five months. He didn’t have a job. He wasn’t ill or infirm. He didn’t have a car, but there was an intricate network of buses and trains to take him anywhere on the British mainland. He could scarcely tell his mother that his failed attempt to kill himself had reminded him he owed her a visit. All he knew was this: from the moment he shut the door of Carolyn’s house and heard the locks snap behind him, he ached to see his mother.

  The bus was late and full of schoolchildren shouting to each other. He sat behind the driver and peered over the tops of hedges until he saw a row of Edwardian brick chimneys looming above a line of laurels. He got out at the next stop and walked back along the lane, through the tall wrought iron gates and down the tarmac drive bordered with fluorescent rhododendrons.

  He hated rhododendrons and he hated Surrey, its smug respectability, its neat copses and enclaves of ostentatious houses dotted among the rows of modest semis like the one he grew up in. But his mother had always aspired to the architectural pastiche of Esher and Woking’s private estates, admired the little boutiques and teashops. So here she was, eking out her last days shuffling from her bedroom down to the dining room and back again, absurdly grateful for the beige slop they called meals and any help she might need in the bathroom.

  He stood by the desk in the empty hall for some minutes. A vase of chrysanthemums, the flower of choice for the budget-conscious, was on the hall table next to a pile of pamphlets extolling the virtues of spending the ‘time remaining’ in Mayfield House. Under the smell of floor polish and disinfectant was a whiff of boiled vegetables.

  No one appeared, so he made his own way up to his mother’s room, remembering how upset she had been on her first day to see her name on the door as Margot Ellison. ‘That’s not right,’ she said, gripping Sandy’s arm. ‘It should be Mrs James Ellison. Can you let them know?’ But he was running late and told himself he didn’t have the time to quibble with staff about arcane etiquette.

  The carpet on the stairs was frayed and dust balls gathered in the corners. The castellated towers of the old wing cast Gothic shadows on the landing where new fire doors had replaced the original mahogany ones and the old bedrooms had been demolished and rebuilt into a modern cost-efficient brick block. The effect was schizophrenic.

  He pushed through the door. It sounded like a refrigerator opening. The door to his mother’s room was open and a cleaner was stripping the bed of sodden linen, wiping down the plastic sheet covering the mattress. Everything stank of disinfectant. The walls were bare, the curtains gone from the window.

  Where were her pictures of him and of his father, the drunken James? The watercolours on the wall, the Yardley English Rose talcum powder on the shelf? Where was the little Turkish rug by the bed, the one she’d asked for, so her feet wouldn’t get cold on the linoleum when she got out of bed at night? It tore at his heart, this sad small box, emptied of all belongings.

  Had she died and no one told him? Had there been messages on the answering machine in Battersea? Messages he’d erased without listening to them, thinking only of avoiding impatient debt collectors. ‘Mr Ellison, your mother is unwell, please call when you receive this message … Mr Ellison, your mother is very ill, please call as soon as possible … Mr Ellison, we’re very sorry to have to tell you this, but your mother has passed away.’

  ‘Excuse me,’ he stammered. ‘My mother, Mrs Ellison …?’ Every word a plea that she still be alive, even though he felt sure she must be dead. The cleaner looked up, a tired grey-faced woman in her late fifties. She smoothed a clean sheet over the bed. Her hands were red and swollen.

  ‘Who?’ she asked. Her accent was thick Eastern European.

  ‘Mrs Ellison,’ said Sandy, very slowly. ‘She used to be in this room.’ Heart hammering, a boy again, small and helpless.

  The woman glared at him. ‘Miss Margot, you mean?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Who you?’

  ‘I’m her son,’ said Sandy and then in case the woman didn’t understand, ‘Miss Margot is my mother.’

  ‘Hmph,’ replied the cleaner, stuffing a pillow into its case. She took forever to speak. He would go mad waiting for her reply. She flung the pillow on the bed.

  ‘She move. Different room. Down hall. You no come.’

  He could have hugged her. His mother was alive, just down the hall. He still had a chance to make it all good again.

  ‘Thank you,’ he said and repeated it again just in case. ‘Thank you.’

  But she had already turned her back on him.

  Sandy hurried down the hall, glancing into each room until
he found his mother at the end of the corridor. She was sitting upright in a floral-patterned armchair, still in her nightdress and dressing-gown. He was about to bowl in and surprise her with a hug and kiss when he saw she was asleep, her head skewed on the pillow stuffed behind her neck. Her thin silver hair had been cut in a jaunty schoolgirl bob, secured at each side of her head with bright pink hairgrips. She’d always had long hair, meticulously arranged in what she called a French pleat, but clearly no one in Mayfield House knew how to do that for her, and someone had chopped the lot off.

  He tiptoed inside. The photographs, the watercolours, the rug by the bed; everything was the same, except for her. In her chair, she appeared shrunken, half the size she used to be. Large wrinkled dewlaps hung below her jaw and her skin was pale and thin like crinkled tissue paper. There was a small line of drool on her chin and he wiped it away with the handkerchief that lay on her lap. She sighed and turned her head. Sandy thought she might wake up, but she didn’t.

  He sat on the floor at her feet. Her slippers had fallen off and he put them back on, carefully easing each one over her cracked and horned toenails, pulling them over the yellow callouses of her heels. Little flakes of skin came away in his hands.

  He leaned his head against her knees and hugged her, feeling at first the ribbed pattern of her chenille dressing-gown, then the faint stubble of her legs and, under that, the frail bones of her shins. There was that familiar sweet close smell about her. He shut his eyes and held on tight.

  ‘I’m sorry they cut your hair, Mum,’ he whispered into a fold of her dressing-gown. ‘I’m sorry for everything and I love you. I’ve messed it up again and I don’t know what to do.’

  He sat for some time. Shadows from trees and sunlight played with each other on the wall opposite the bed. He couldn’t see out the window because it was placed above his head, just below the ceiling. He knew about clerestory windows, how Egyptians first used them to illuminate temple columns, how medieval artisans built them into cathedral walls so people could still see, but not be distracted from their prayers.

  But who would design such a room now with so little consideration of its inhabitants? Who would deprive an elderly man or woman a pleasure as simple as looking out a window, or feeling a breeze, however slight, against their face? A third question came, unbidden and unwanted, requiring an answer. Who would neglect their only surviving parent for months on end?

  He listened to the clang of trolleys in the hall. He heard people laughing and walking quickly, the sad hiss of wheelchairs’ rubber tyres pushing along the linoleum; the drip of the bathroom tap, each rasping breath his mother took, and the rub of her legs against the rough fabric of the armchair. He was not quite awake, not quite asleep and it seemed that his mother reached down to his head and stroked it with her blue-veined and splotched hand.

  ‘Don’t fret, darling boy, it won’t be so bad when you grow up,’ she whispered. ‘It won’t hurt so much.’

  It was like being tucked into bed after a story, her cool kiss on his forehead, the bedside lamp being switched off and the hall light safely shining into his room; like being allowed to lie in her bed during the day when colds and fevers kept him out of school. So calm and peaceful, just the two of them, the way it had been when his father was out or sleeping it off. He could stay here forever.

  Then there was a loud crash outside the door, the sound of something breaking, and someone swearing. Sandy jerked his head, immediately alert, with a fierce crick in his neck and stiff from sitting on the floor for so long.

  ‘But I am grown up,’ he whispered into her knee. ‘I’m fifty-eight, Mum.’ He realised he must have been dreaming because when he struggled to his feet, he saw his mother still asleep and he knew he had to hurry to catch the last bus back to Woking.

  emily.ellison@gmail.com

  To: mattman5@hotmail.com

  Do you mean it? Really? You might come here? Oh Matt, that would be a very fine thing. Get away from the madness of our parents. One of the many great things about being here in India is all that stuff doesn’t seem to matter that much. Don’t get sucked in. Mum and Dad can fix themselves up if they want to. I think we should live our way now.

  There is this teacher here who says we’d all be so much more content if we stopped trying for happiness and love, all that stuff in Dad’s pop songs. He says all that trivial stuff passes and we should look for truth instead, and then we would be truly happy. Oh, and that woman I told you about, Annie. Apparently her sister died when she was young, in her twenties – the sister, I mean. Poor her. I’d be lost without my brother. Anyhow, I’m thinking of moving into her place. She has a spare room and it’s so much cheaper. We’re going walking in the mountains next week. No cars, no noise. Fresh air. Yes, yes. And yes again. Miss you. Stay clean and clear.

  Xx e Forgot to say one of Dad’s worst efforts is high on the ringtone pop charts here. One by that greaser Joe Fleetfield. He came to dinner once and rubbed up against me in the hall when he thought no one was looking. I was all of fifteen. Funny how you and I don’t like music that much. Can’t imagine why.

  Chapter 17

  Peter decided to take up Frieda’s offer to cook dinner for everyone at her flat. She’d been characteristically practical since Sandy had disappeared just before Penny had left Sarlat. No one had any idea where he was. Frieda was the only one who thought to offer Penny a place to stay, knowing she didn’t have a flat in London and guessing she wouldn’t want to bunk down in Hoxton with Matthew and his flatmates.

  ‘Are you sure?’ asked Peter. ‘You’ve never even met Penny.’

  ‘It’s fine,’ said Frieda. ‘Besides, I’m curious.’

  ‘And kind,’ he said. ‘Thank you.’ He went to kiss her, but she waved him away with hands greasy from butter and herbs. Cooking was another of their shared pastimes, but with carefully delineated responsibilities. Peter chopped with Frieda’s range of surgically sharp knives while she presided over tasting, adjusting and seasoning. They’d decided on tarte tatin and Richard Olney’s spatchcocked chicken stuffed under the skin. Under her precise instructions, Peter chopped garlic, oregano and parsley, and grated parmesan cheese before prising the chicken skin away from the meat.

  ‘Careful,’ said Frieda, looking over his shoulder as she mixed ricotta and the herbs in a bowl. ‘Do it slowly otherwise the skin will tear. Shall we add some mushrooms? Or courgettes? I think courgettes, don’t you?’

  Peter nodded.

  ‘So,’ said Frieda. ‘Why do you think Sandy has gone missing?’

  ‘Avoiding confrontation, looking for attention. It’s hard to say,’ said Peter. ‘Tim and Angie will have their own ideas, no doubt all very touchy-feely. He’s been gone less than a couple of days. Maybe he went to a spa, or a retreat. I’ve tried Jeremy, but he hasn’t called back. I even tried Jeremy’s secretary. She says he’s away, didn’t say where. So who knows?’

  Frieda wiped down the bench and began scrubbing bowls and knives. She was methodical like that, cleaning as she went along.

  ‘All this fuss about one well-fed relatively prosperous man who lacks willpower to organise his life. So what if he isn’t as successful as he used to be? There are millions of people all over the world who aspire to his kind of failure – running water, shelter, freedom of speech. Need I go on?’

  ‘We’re selfish and self-obsessed compared to our parents.’ Peter began wiping everything dry. ‘Ah, the mantra of my Finchley youth – Dad telling me every day he came to this country with one pair of bloody underpants. “I tell you, my boy, work, work.”’

  ‘You still do, and very hard,’ said Frieda. She didn’t mind that he hadn’t made it as a movie director, that he earned his living from television commercials. Frieda said she liked herself well enough to like him for himself.

  He looked up, across to Frieda’s sitting room with its wide oak planked floors, the Saarinen dining table, the Eames chair in the tall bay window, the Craigie Aitchison pictures of sheep and Bedlington terrie
rs on the walls. Everything so beautiful, so perfectly positioned. He was the only untidy thing in her precise, poised life, but Frieda didn’t appear to mind.

  Peter thought he might be falling in love for the first time and wondered what it would be like to be married. He’d always considered his parents’ cosiness as claustrophobic. Now, with Frieda by his side, he was not so sure. Watching her stir the apples in a pan, seeing her breasts rise as she paused to brush back her hair, he was overcome by lust and tenderness in equal parts. But he knew better than to interrupt her while she was cooking.

  ‘Dad never took anything, even a cup of tea, for granted,’ Peter continued. ‘It’s the curse of our generation, don’t you think? Always wanting more, bigger, better.’

  ‘Watch it,’ said Frieda. ‘You’re in danger of entering old git territory and I’m not going there. Tell me, what was Sandy like when you met him?’

  ‘Oh, Tim and I were pure grammar school – polyester shirts and nylon sheets. Jeremy and Sandy weren’t at Eton, but one of the famous ones. Harrow or Charterhouse. It mattered then. To us they were like something out of Brideshead Revisited. All that was missing was bloody Aloysius the teddy bear. Jeremy was very driven, always got everyone to do what he wanted.’

  ‘Nothing’s changed there,’ said Frieda. ‘But I was asking about Sandy.’

  ‘Sandy always looked up to Jeremy, always agreed with him and did what he wanted to do. It was as if they had some secret bond. Maybe they buggered each other back in the dormitory. Tim and I could never work it out. Sandy was charming and sensitive. It’s an old-fashioned thing, I know, but he had lovely manners. One of his teachers had told him politeness could disguise shyness. He was reading history, but he was mad about music even then, all that early San Francisco psychedelic stuff. The Electric Prunes, Iron Butterfly, Vanilla Fudge. And country too. Emmylou Harris and Gram Parsons.’