Chain Reaction

by Gillian White

  Hopeless to try and hurry. ‘There’s milk in my bag,’ calls Irene, quite forgetting she’s stolen it, giving herself away again, asking for trouble. But a question bubbles to the surface of her mind—Hang on a minute—it’s not her who deserves a good talking to this time, it’s them. It’s these devious conspirators who have put her flat up for sale behind her back and now they’ve got to answer to her, the rightful owner. From the kitchen she hears the rattle of crocks, but she’s miles away now, thinking about feeding the geese in the park with Frankie when she was little. You try to do something kind with the bits of bread in your paper bag, and how do they react? They overwhelm you, demanding more, pricking at you with their sharp yellow beaks, shrieking and squealing and beating their wings till you wish you’d never come in the first place. Till you vow you’ll never feed them again.

  Gobble, gobble gobble, the devils. They don’t love you after all. They hate you. They are coming to eat you all up.

  TWO

  ‘Joyvern’, 11, The Blagdons, Milton, Devon

  JOY IS TOO YOUNG to have benefited from the pious verse of Faith Steadfast and anyway, women had ceased endeavouring to be steadfast long before the poet’s demise. All Joy knows is that they are conspiring to drive her mad. Total strangers with fine drizzle on their hair known only by surname and briefly introduced by the agent, come with their swivelling eyes, their cold and greedy eyes, and sometimes their extended families to sneer at Joy’s airing cupboard and to take note of the state of her lavatory bowls.

  Blue water, pink water, green water… out of the colours of the rainbow, Lord which is the most hygienic?

  She’ll soon close the door on another lot.

  They tread mud through on the carpet but still she must be deferential. If they delve hard enough, they might uncover some private life hidden deceitfully from view. Is it through the mirror? Is it under the stairs?

  The bathroom glistens and glows and smells like a perpetual garden. It is nobody’s smell in particular, Joy has made certain of that. What would it smell like if left to itself—decomposition? Surely not as bad as that! Their lives might have changed for the worse, but they’re still alive and in with a chance, aren’t they?

  If only…

  ‘And this is the en suite bathroom,’ she gushes. Oh, when did life cease to be fun and turn into one uphill struggle?

  And why is Vernon never around when she has to endure this ordeal?

  Domestos sits like silk on the water, a layer of hygiene laid across by a loving hand like a sheet over a sleeping child. On guard against germs. Perhaps if the water was black they’d be more impressed? She’d like to do something nasty in it, like drop a fag-end down, a fag-end that shreds and won’t flush away. No, she wouldn’t. She couldn’t bear them to think of her like that.

  She doesn’t even smoke. Nobody does, these days.

  Nobody moves house these days either, not unless they jolly well have to. That’s what everyone says, so reasoning otherwise sounds suspicious. You might as well just come clean and admit, ‘We’ve run out of money so we’ve got to sell or the bank will sell it over our heads.’

  As soon as she’d seen them, these latest viewers, these people from Lancashire with their northern accents, she’d quenched a flicker of disappointment, assuming they were not the ones. ‘You don’t like this house, I can tell you don’t like it. You are wasting my time and yours, so why don’t you just go away?’

  If only Joy could be honest and say that, instead of playing these mind-games. But rather than be honest that way with anyone, Joy Marsh would bite through her lip, gnash right through it, sharp white enamel through soft pink flesh. Self-mutilation. She’d abuse herself and anyone else if they started being honest like that.

  She was brought up as a good woman, not to be honest.

  She had crushed a garlic clove in the kitchen the moment she heard the doorbell chime, her shoulders raised in anticipation. Another lie, suggesting she cooks with garlic and herbs although she does, sometimes. Truth be told, she might as well leave out the old frying pan full of Vernon’s bacon butty fat. He’s taken to bacon butties in the mornings, flying in the face of the health warnings, flying in the face of all sorts of warnings because what does it matter now?

  Might as well leave his seat belt off. I mean, it hardly goes round his waist any more, he has put on so much weight. Some people eat when they are depressed. They eat and gorge and grunt grunt grunt. While others starve themselves into shrunken relics. Might as well cut the lawn with the safety catch off the electric mower, might as well leave the door unlocked so that burglars can get in. Oh, it’s all so puny, so hopeless these days to do anything COURAGEOUS or CARELESS. You can’t ride your horse over dangerous hedges till it drops and breaks its neck and yours, or wage war, or throw down a challenge to Norman Mycroft at the bank, slap his baby face with a glove. YOU CAN’T FIGHT BACK.

  So what does anything matter if you have to go on being meek?

  She and Vernon have lost everything, haven’t they?

  Everything they fought for.

  What a good thing the chickens have flown the coop. She couldn’t have stood all this humiliation in front of the children.

  ‘And this is the master bedroom,’ she smiles, softly leading the way and surreptitiously squeezing the tiny white linen bag full of rose pot pourri—to cover what, the smell of sex? A seasidey, weedy, frondy smell, or is that just the smell of woman? She can hardly remember, it is so long since sex was anything more than a scuffle… but she thinks that hot men smell of sex and apples. She knows these people don’t like ‘Joyvern’ but still Joy is anxious to please, keen to impress. She can’t help it.

  ‘Master bedroom?’ So what is that supposed to mean? That it’s owned by the master of the house, or that this bedroom, because of its size, dominates the three others by wielding the stick. A bully bedroom. How absurd is this estate agents’ language and how pitiful that she is forced to use it.

  A fungal colour? She never thought of it that way when she ordered the Laura Ashley beige, when she considered that beige gloss would offset the bedspread of dusky apricot. The inside of a mushroom? Very tasteful, with bits of burnt bacon rind blazed into the colour of the rug.

  Vernon’s alarm clock set at seven-thirty, seven-thirty all his life.

  Carefully placed books on the two bedside tables are false as the garlic in the kitchen. Sacred Hunger—she hopes there is no bedroom message in the title that these—what are their names?—that these Middletons might pick up and misinterpret. They probably won’t, for these people clearly have no taste. Joy never managed actually to get into the book although she was gullible enough to buy it when she saw it on special display in Smiths. That’s partly why they are in this mess, because of her endless shopping, because she’s attracted to display like a dowdy female peacock. Or a jackdaw with a nest to feather. A craving for brightness. For owning things. An illness, some people say. There’s counselling groups in America. Wardrobes for His and Hers, only Hers runs along 90 per cent of the wall space while his is a humble single unit filled from Marks & Spencer. On Vernon’s side sits a Kingsley Amis which someone gave him one Christmas. It dryly covers a temptingly fat Jilly Cooper.

  A tense and nervous woman somewhere in her forties, Mrs Middleton’s pink lipstick spiders into the lines round her mouth. ‘Not much of a view,’ she says from the window, her face gone an unhealthy green from the wet and leafy reflection there.

  It creates such a shocking lack of privacy, this showing people round. The bedroom is full of sleeping breath like evening shadows. There must be hidden toenail cuttings splintering over the carpet. ‘We get the view in the winter,’ says Joy in her most genteel tones, ‘when that tree is dead.’

  ‘Hum,’ says Mr Middleton, stooping, viewing himself through the dressing-table mirror and smoothing back his hair. That mirror must be shocked, it’s so long since it has seen anyone else’s reflection but hers, and there was a time just lately when she pressed her
lips hard against it, and her nipples, too, squashed and cooled like the blunt, soft noses of puppies. Lips and nipples, both left smudges of cloud on the glass. This was when she was trying to find herself after learning of their financial predicament, so totally disorientated she was trying to rediscover herself physically. Joy is a small, dumpy woman with rounded features and bright blue eyes. Homely, she supposes, homely, nuzzling and familiar. Thousands of women look like Joy, but not many dress with her kind of style. Her haircut is short and sensible with a short and sensible fringe. She’s a busy person, only just turning grey at the edges.

  ‘There’s no view through there,’ Joy would like to remind the usurper, ‘unless you enjoy staring at long-nosed men with mean, bad-tempered eyes and thinning brown hair.’ That’s not fair. Joy knows she is being unfair, but these men are so ruthless with their little bit of power, like everyone else these days in the privileged position to buy. And why doesn’t Mrs Middleton tell him that he has a bad case of dandruff?

  Joy can’t help being spiteful; she doesn’t want to sell her house.

  The two Middleton teenagers fidget, obviously aware that this house is not to their parents’ taste and unprepared to play Let’s Pretend like them, nor brave it out. The graceless girl, the older one, dressed from head to toe in black plastic, sits on the edge of the bed as if to test the springs, as if the bed is for sale as well, but Joy will not rise to the bait. Their attitude is a mixture of laughter and scorn. Well, what does anyone expect for the money? This is a perfectly respectable house on a perfectly respectable estate. Some might call it a square box but it’s been a good home to Joy and Vernon. These kids have probably been dragged around hundreds of unsuitable houses, poor things, and are bored to death by now. Huh. The Middletons probably haven’t even sold theirs yet, it’s probably not even on the market. They just enjoy spending their days disturbing other people and conspiring to drive them mad, viewing houses as some folks take to the roads at weekends in order to go deliberately slowly and block everyone else.

  Perhaps the Middletons are impostors and don’t even have a house to sell.

  The agents swore that they vetted their viewers, made sure they were serious contenders before they allowed them loose in their clients’ homes. Well, the agents swore many things when first the Marshes went on the market. They promised they would show people round for a start, and that they would advertise widely… but so far they haven’t turned up once, and there’s been no sign of an ad in any of the local papers.

  Ah well…

  ‘We’d have done better to try and sell it ourselves,’ Vernon said morosely after four weeks went by with no response whatsoever. Poor, dear Vernon. Running that shop never worked out; it swallowed all that precious redundancy money for which they’d had such high hopes. Joy is forced to close her eyes against that mocking memory. You would think an electrical engineer would be able to sell electrical appliances, knowing all about them and backing up every sale with a customer-friendly repair deal. Marsh Electronics Ltd, not the most imaginative title, not the most imaginative man. But Vernon was so brave. He is still brave. It is she who is the snivelling coward. It’s true, heroes are men like Vernon who get up and go to work every single wet morning for the trivial trappings of this world, blind to the views of the universe. Heroes are the lonely people who get through Sundays all alone, not the reckless men who go barging into battle, adrenalin flowing like flags in the wind. It is Vernon and men like him who should be given the medals.

  Unfortunately, it had been the wrong time for Marsh Electronics, as well as the wrong place. There’re hardly any shops surviving in that arcade now, not since they built the new one beside the harbour. And they can’t even fill those—they are still three-quarters empty, and no wonder with the rents they charge! And now he is stuck with the lease to pay and a Sale that goes on endlessly, and unless they can sell the house… But that’s all water under the bridge. Now Joy must be positive.

  ‘And next there’s the roof extension.’

  Up they spiral, this forced little party, one by one to the loft conversion Vernon built himself and was once so proud of—the fairy on top of the Christmas tree, this room at the top of the house. When the children left home they had to have somewhere to store the clutter, so of course it was piled up here. In those days they never imagined they would have to sell so soon. Walls of stripped and shiny pine, a window in the roof which floods the little room with light, ‘an airy office space,’ Vernon called it, ‘a quiet room where we can keep the computer or come and read or write letters or even put people up if the spare room is already taken.’

  ‘Isn’t this lovely?’

  The floorboards are bare but for colourful rugs.

  Joy turns to face the Middletons, determined to wrest some positive energy out of these uninspired people. They will not go away disparaging Vernon’s important work. ‘You can see for miles from here,’ she says, standing on tiptoe and gesturing out over the cul-de-sac, seeing a little V of birds fly over. Her washing hangs helplessly out on the line, left in the garden from last night. Rain streaks and tickles down the glass. She sees her own desperate face reflected in the window and it mocks her. Messy wet hair from showing the Middletons round outside. They looked but they did not see. And she was the same before she knew she was leaving; she too walked across the cool, green grass, past the cobwebs, the soft mauve flowers, the wonderful wet Michaelmas daisies, the black twigs of the thorn hedge and the dangling swing, abandoned now. All so precious, so familiar, all so taken for granted before.

  More like a box room now. Up here the air is acrid from disuse, it smells like skin and the stale warmth of the room is unpleasant. ‘On a clear day you can even see the moors.’

  ‘It’s not very big,’ sniffs the Middletons’ oldest child with disappointed eyes.

  ‘No, well it’s shrunk since we were forced into using it as a store room,’ says Joy with a chilly smile but still determined. ‘It is really quite spacious without all these boxes of books.’

  ‘Yes, I’m sure it is,’ says Mrs Middleton, fiddling with her handbag strap and keen to renegotiate the spindly stairway, down onto safer ground again. The woman is a bag of nerves, depressed, too, worse than I am, thinks Joy. And she pities her, and wonders what is the matter.

  ‘Look,’ she says more cheerfully, ‘my husband built a bar behind there. You can just see it if you bend—’

  ‘Very useful,’ says Mrs Middleton, looking away. Her little head jerks on a neck like a stem. ‘Always nice to have a bar.’

  ‘But you and Dad don’t drink,’ says the oldest Middleton child.

  Cauliflower cheese.

  Again. They eat quietly at the kitchen table but it all feels like an illusion. This house is for sale, this house is not their home any more, no matter how much she has cared for it and looked after it, and after her latest ordeal Joy isn’t hungry, she is quivering and tense. For so long she has seen Vernon as grown up and wise; he is the one who let her feel safe and she experiences a momentary chill, a rebellion against him—for his hurt and his disappointment are also his betrayal.

  Its awful, it’s mean and unfair to think this way but Vernon has let her down. She has heard of couples married for over thirty years and the man goes off just like that, leaving the woman to wonder whether any of their life was honest. Well, Joy has been married for just twenty-three, and she will never let Vernon know it, but this situation feels rather like that to her…

  ‘There’s no point in us looking at properties yet, Joy, not until we get an offer which is acceptable. If we did, we would be as bad as them.’ And his worried eyes flicker off her.

  Cautious and sensible as usual. Chew chew chew. Mastication. She watched a television programme last night which showed you where the food went, the whole digestive process. Liquids and solids. Sensible, solid Vernon like his sensible, solid father before him. Indistinct families moving behind net curtains and voting Tory to maintain the status quo. Status quo? She will never
vote Tory again. Joy wonders if he can honestly contemplate the mess they are in. Nothing in his life has ever prepared him for this—and how long did he fend off the truth so even she didn’t know the true extent of their difficulties? To Vernon, bankruptcy is a crime.

  If they sell the house now they will be just in time to prevent it.

  Joy argues; she needs to know where they’re going. Her home is important to her image. ‘But we must get some idea, Vernon. Some idea of size if nothing else so I can sort out the furniture.’

  ‘We can do that by looking in the paper. Simple enough.’

  But that’s not the same. She has looked in the papers, she is looking all the time, and this is all part of Joy’s inner turmoil. She saw a flat this morning, for £45,000. Surely they won’t end up living in a grotty flat like a couple of students starting out? She doesn’t like to pressurise Vernon any more than he is already. His blood pressure is high. He is on pills from the doctor and he should not eat so much salt. At least they are not caught in this negative equity trap like some; they bought Joyvern too long ago for that. Fifteen years is a long time to live in a house and have to leave it. Still, Joy would quite like to look round other properties all the same. After the debts have been paid they should have enough for somewhere half decent.

  What will Vernon do with himself all day?

  Tired, sick and fat.

  A qualified electrical engineer, fifty-two years old and on the scrapheap. Despite what this government would have us believe, retraining programmes for men of Vernon’s age are ridiculous. Who’s going to employ a fifty-two-year-old retrained man with no experience when there’s kids around in the self-same boat with all their working lives ahead of them? I ask you.

  Perhaps he could do some gardening, £3.50 an hour on the side for some cantankerous old woman?

  And he’d once been so proud of himself.

  They’d even dreamed of a world cruise.