Crustaceans

by Andrew Cowan

  I have been back there just once, the last day in October, and I shan’t go again. It was a Sunday morning, a damp haze in the air. Church bells were tolling. I went in by the side door. The lights were out and there was no one around. I crept along the dark concrete corridors in silence and enclosed myself in my studio. There were cobwebs, a smell of dry earth. The mildew on the skylight had spread. I sat in my chair and took out my tobacco. I used my father’s bowl as an ashtray. The crocks Ruth had collected that evening still lay in the dustpan. Jugs of slip had gone hard and cracked. Dust lay over everything – on the work I’d left out, on my wheel and the floor – but the only footprints were mine. No one else would have gone in there. The same rent reminder was taped to my wall, though I was by then five months in arrears. Like the smoking, I hadn’t kept to my commitments. My studio was not in regular use, not in any use at all, which ought to have qualified someone on the waiting list to adopt it. I’d failed to contribute to the running of the cooperative and now owed them thirty hours of my time. I hadn’t turned up for the lessons I’d advertised in the newsletter. But of course my circumstances were particularly unusual, extenuating. I should have been served notice to quit. I doubted anyone would ever approach me.

  I got up and sat at my wheel. I switched it on – the heavy thrum – and pressed down on the pedal. I leant on my forearms, my hands cupped and ready, six inches apart. I closed my eyes, and remembered. When I first began to learn at the wheel I would work the spinning clay until it collapsed with exhaustion. The splash-tray would be swimming, the floor splattered, my arms and my apron, my neighbours. And the clay, which I could not force to whatever template I had in mind, would lose all substance, its momentum and energy spent. Which was always my failing, to overwork, never trusting to chance, the material. I held to an ideal of perfection like a sickness; and I know, because Ruth told me, that I similarly tried to overwork you. Give him some space, Paul, she’d say; and though in the end I learned to ease off, to let you move on, it worried me now that I’d left it so long. I was always too keen to instruct you. I’d wanted from the start to make of you the perfect imitation of a boy, your childhood exactly proportioned. And I wondered, Did you have time in your five years to grow into yourself, Euan, independent of me, the hands of your father? Those aspects of you I’d found hardest – your obstinacy, energy, refusal – were now what I most valued. You wouldn’t be taught, hadn’t the patience for lessons. I never could mould you. I hoped I could not. The blue metal disc spun freely, empty. I took my foot from the pedal and pulled the plug from the wall. I gathered up my tobacco and papers, my hat and my gloves. I tugged the rent reminder from my wall. My time in that place was over, and I left the door to the corridor open, my keys in the lock.

  TWENTY-SIX

  My grandfather coughed and gave the barest of nods. He stepped around me and snorted, spat into the nettles outside in his garden. There was an old tin ashtray on his workbench, a part-smoked cigarette next to his matches. He pinched out the black plug of ash and relit it. So what set this off, Paul? he asked then, up-ending a bicycle. He sat down on a stool, his knees creaking, and adjusted his spectacles. He spun the rear wheel and leaned forward, holding a stub of blue chalk to the rim. Eh? What’s behind this? he said. It was early afternoon, a Sunday in April, and my grandmother was cooking. I glanced over my shoulder and saw her blurred form through the steam on the windows. The smells of dinner were thick in my mouth. I just think I should know, I said quietly, as if she might hear us. I’m sixteen, I shrugged; I don’t see why I shouldn’t be told.

  My grandfather nodded – perhaps to the bike, calculating the work to be done – then stopped the wheel spinning. He took the cigarette from his lips and dropped it behind him. And your dad, Paul, he said; what does he have to say? Not a lot, I replied; he won’t talk about it, so there’s no point in asking. I see, said my grandfather; but you’ve spoken to your aunt Rene? Yes, I said; sort of. He indicated a tool on the floor. Pass me that up, Paul, he said, and pressed a blunt finger to the air-valve, waited for the tyre to deflate. The tool was a spoke-key. He tucked it beneath his thigh on the stool, his legs wide apart, and plucked one by one at the slim rods, listening for slackness, then tightening the nipples, easing them off. He’d once shown me how to do this, or tried to, but I remembered only his irritation, and the moment he’d snatched the tool from me. He wasn’t a patient man, never liked to have to explain things, and as he talked now, his voice sometimes taut with the effort of turning the key, his breath shallow and nasal, I folded my arms and leant back on the doorframe; I kept myself quiet. They were fools, he said, grunting; and I told them so. But I didn’t force them into it, not at all, Paul. The wedding was their own decision – white dress, church; nothing to be ashamed of, not as they saw it. She was four months gone by then, four and a half. October the twenty-eighth.

  He glanced up and I nodded. There were no dates written down, and of course it wasn’t an anniversary my father ever mentioned or celebrated, but returning that day from Aunt Rene’s I’d gone first to the coach-house and retrieved my parents’ album of photos. I’d taken it upstairs to my bedroom. Rain had spattered my window. Below in the barn my father was working. Looking down, I’d glimpsed the blue blade of a flame and a sudden bright shower of sparks. A lump of metal had clanked to the floor of his studio and I’d closed my curtains, switched on my desk-lamp. I’d opened the album. In the photographs there was sunshine. The trees in the churchyard were shedding their leaves; dark shadows of branches lay over the pathways, across my father and Ron as they came through the gates. It was autumn, quite clearly, and there could be no doubt that my mother was pregnant. She had chosen her dress for concealment alone. Tucked tight under her bust, everything below was a splay of white fabric; between the accentuation of her breasts and the spread of her hemline she had no shape of her own. I’d examined the faces – my aunt Rene’s, Aunt Jeannie’s, my other relations’ – hoping to find some clue to their thoughts. But there was nothing. They smiled for the camera, held on to their hats, stood as the photographer told them. They posed as they wished to be remembered, and I’d looked instead to the space – gouged from each page – where my mother’s own face had been. Flanked by my father and grandfather, the point of her knife had fallen just short of their shoulders, their heads. My grandfather’s arms were stiff by his sides, his fists almost clenched, but he too appeared to be smiling.

  As he worked methodically now at the wheel, his sleeves rolled high past his elbows, revealing the tattoos on his forearms and the pale ragged skin of his biceps, my grandfather said he hadn’t intended to be there; until the eve of the wedding he’d refused to discuss it, the day could happen without him. He remembered my grandmother’s coldness – the meals they’d passed without speaking – and Jeannie’s persistence, her phone-calls and letters and visits. He remembered, he said, my mother’s hysterics. And though he’d regretted it since, in the end he had gone solely to give her away. Just that, Paul, he said; I walked her up the aisle and handed her over. She’d made her choices. I told her she needn’t come back after that, not to this house, because she wouldn’t be welcome. He shook his head and pushed at the wheel, sat back on his stool. The axle ticked as it turned. That’s what I told her, he said, and took off his glasses, stared down at the lenses. For a short while then he was silent. I heard a clatter of pans in the kitchen, the wheeze in his breath, and I waited.

  Two years I kept that up, he murmured. I wouldn’t entertain her. She used to come when I was at work – whatever shift I was on, she would be round here. Because she was having a hard time of it, Paul. I couldn’t ignore that. She needed more help than she got. He folded the spectacles into his pocket and pressed down on his knees, slowly raised himself from the stool. His legs when he stood were bandy and his corduroys hung loosely. He unbuckled his belt and drew the strap a notch tighter. We made our peace anyway, he said; or I’d never have seen you otherwise. You brought us together, you might say. His smile was fleet
ing. He tugged the lid from a tobacco tin and swiftly rolled up a cigarette, struck a match and inhaled, snapped out the flame. But your dad was a cunt, Paul. I went over there once, confronted him. This was after your mother took bad. Something needed to be said, but there was no getting through to him. He was that wrapped up in himself. He hadn’t the time for her – it was always his work. And when he wasn’t working he was drinking. Because he liked his booze, son; he was fond of a drink. So was she, I objected. No, my grandfather replied; no, your mum didn’t like it. There’s the difference, eh? She didn’t like it. He moved his stool to one side and lifted the bicycle, hooked it on to the wall. She was drunk when she died, he said then, and looked at me grimly, his face shadowed, unshaven. Killed herself, I said, and my grandfather nodded. Yes, he said. Killed herself, Paul.

  Some things, a few, had never been hidden. My mother was nineteen when she married, my father eleven years older. He wasn’t at that time a tutor, but a technical assistant, recently graduated himself, for he had left school at fifteen, apprenticed first to a foundry and later employed as a welder. His own father had died in a coal-mine – his mother, he said, of her lungs – and he still kept on the wall in our hallway a painting of some colliery headgears in winter, the paint thickly laid, slabs of white in the foreground, the sky grey and empty. It was one of my mother’s, produced when she was a student, but then she had given up college, abandoned her course to get married, and eventually she had given up painting, tipped her brushes and paints in the bin, and burned all her papers. I could remember watching as she’d knelt by the grate, feeding sheet after sheet onto the flames, the pages blackening, curling into themselves, abruptly igniting. I’d knelt with her, and when finally my father had come into the kitchen he’d shouted, and hauled me away, and then they had argued. She had screamed and he’d hit her. Because, I’d supposed, she shouldn’t have let me sit so close to the fire, and she shouldn’t have been drinking. But of course she was ill. She was often in hospital – four times in one year – and then she had gone or passed on or been taken. She had taken herself, my father once said. She gassed herself, my grandfather now told me.

  There had been other attempts. Twice before she had used the pills she was taking, her anti-depressants; and once, when she was my age, a mixture of spirits and aspirins. The drinks, he remembered, were left over from Christmas, an inch or so in each bottle – just enough then to make her quite ill, to make her throw up – but he couldn’t now recollect what had driven her to it, why she’d become so unhappy. Something and nothing, he said; because it never took much, Paul, not with your mum. It was there in her nature. Jeannie was always the steady one. With Jeannie you knew where you were. But your mum went through extremes, son. She got carried away with herself, and when things didn’t work out … I took the belt to her once. I thought she’d snap out of it. He gave a shake of his head and took a long breath, then came to stand in the doorway beside me, facing out to the garden, the house, and I smelled the embrocation he used on his knees; I heard my grandmother’s voice. Two minutes, she called; you’ll be washing your hands? And my grandfather grunted; he drew on his cigarette. I listened to her footsteps receding, the scuff and flap of her slippers, and then quietly I said, But this time she gassed herself, Grandad?

  Yes, son, he nodded, and tossed his cigarette into the nettles. Briefly he touched the top of my arm. He stepped into the garden, and as I followed slowly behind him – stooping sometimes to hear what he said – he described how my father had found her, seemingly asleep on the floor of the kitchen, her head in her arms and the oven wide open. It was two in the morning, and she had finished a bottle of whisky. She wasn’t long out of hospital. Her doctor had discharged her three days before. She’d been given a course of shock treatment, and it seemed to have helped her. She was a little forgetful perhaps, slow on the uptake, but cheerful. She had said she felt fine, and there wasn’t a note; she had left no explanation. Nothing, my grandfather said, and made a noise then like a gasp, something caught in his throat. He paused by the flowers at the end of the lawn, bunched his fists in his pockets, and I glanced to his face, looked quickly away. From the kitchen there was silence. I sensed my grandmother was watching, and cautiously I said, Maybe I was the reason, Grandad. If she hadn’t got pregnant? But my grandfather didn’t reply. He had said as much as he could do – as much, I supposed, as there was – and gazing up to my bedroom, the windows blankly reflecting the sky, I remembered the day she had brought me here from our house, the hedges swollen in sunshine and the clack of her heels, the mauve indentation where her ring should have been. In the kitchen she had bent to embrace me and told me to be a good boy; she had said she would come for me later. But of course she hadn’t returned – days had passed before I’d seen her again; several weeks more till she’d returned from the hospital – and then again she had gone; she had left me. Because, I’d come to believe, she hadn’t wanted a child. She had died because her future was never meant to include me. And as I followed my grandfather now to the kitchen, dipped my hands in the sink and took my place at the table – the blue-painted wall directly before me, my grandparents’ chairs to each side – I knew I would probably always believe that.

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  You hadn’t much sense of a future, the shape of a life. I remember your last day at nursery and your first day at school. It was always my job to take and collect you. At first in your buggy, and later walking beside me, we left our house at eight thirty, returned home around four. Your school was called Highfields, and for nearly three years we passed by it routinely, twice daily. Every morning we crossed over the road at the pelican and walked alongside the railings. There were netball hoops in the playground, Portakabins, footballs, a low distant cluster of buildings. The narrow streets all around, deserted before and soon after, would be streaming at that time with children, their parents, and as we eased our way through them, past the noise and crush at the gates and the cars bumping on to the pavements, I would tighten my grip on your hand. But though I knew in the end I would lose you – soon enough you’d take your place inside those railings – it was rare that you showed any interest. Even on your last day of nursery, you didn’t look up. The windows glowed in the murk of that morning and I lifted you into my arms; I pointed across to the buildings. That’ll be your classroom, I told you; just after Christmas. I know that, you said, squirming to get down, pushing against me; you don’t have to show me, Daddy.

  Your nursery was called BusyBees, five long streets further on. The pavements widened and the buildings grew larger. There were basements and forecourts and name-plaques. We passed solicitors, architects, software consultants, an office supplier’s, two homes for the elderly. Every day we passed by them. Our route never varied, and we talked very little, at least not to each other. You would speak to yourself, in your own world, and if I heard you say Daddy I knew you couldn’t mean me. Most mornings you’d have something with you, something from home, and that day it was one of Ruth’s compacts. You ambled along at my side, absorbed in your face in the mirror, the click of the clasp and the hinges, and you barely lifted your gaze till we reached the gates of the nursery. Then you dropped it into my pocket, as I knew that you would, for whatever it was you were carrying – a toy or a shell, one of Ruth’s things or something of mine – its use for you ended as soon as I pressed on the doorbell, and then you’d be gone, striding past Sophie or Lesley or Hannah, whoever it was that ushered you in, often forgetting to say goodbye in your hurry, your impatience to get on with your day. See you later, I’d call, though that morning I crouched down and hugged you; I kissed the top of your head.

  The door wasn’t locked when I came to collect you, and the hallway was empty. I paused and breathed deeply. I checked the menu-board for what you’d been eating, and I gazed at your coat-peg, the name sticker fading. I stared at your face in a photograph – two years younger and plumper – and I examined the paintings taped to the walls, any one of which might have been yours. Th
en for the last time I opened the door to the Quiet Room, where once I would have found you – the smaller children having their story, restlessly listening – and crossed to the noise of the Art Room, where I took my place by the sinks and looked for your head amongst all those others, your dark bob of hair. You were wearing an apron, poster paint on your hands, and when finally you saw me you stopped working abruptly, abandoned the apron and came over to meet me. You tugged at my hand – it was time we were leaving – and though Hannah and Kay came forward to hug you, and I insisted you say goodbye to your friends, and thanks to your teachers, it seemed none of this was important; it meant nothing to you. I collected your toothbrush and mug from the bathroom, and the drawstring bag with your plimsolls, then your workbooks and drawings and paintings, and found you alone in the hallway, trying to button your coat. As I crouched down to help you I smelled the perfume in your clothes, the scent of your teachers. I counted your fingers into your gloves, and eased your hat over your ears; I held you by the shoulders and smiled. And that was the end of it, your three years in that place. You didn’t glance back as we left, but rushed on ahead, and when later I asked what you’d been doing all day, you told me you couldn’t remember.