It's Gone Dark Over Bill's Mother's

by Lisa Blower

  He rubs his mouth against the top of her head. She feels his teeth against her skin.

  You smell like wet ash, she says.

  She thinks of the nettles on the dining-room table and wonders if she should throw them on the fire for more warmth. Enough, she will say. Stop making me do these things. I’m here now. I’m here. I’ve left.

  She leans forward to lift the tea towel, to check on her foot.

  God, that really hurt, she says.

  He examines her foot. It needs an expert’s attention but the hospital is over thirty miles away. And he is drunk. And she is almost. And they are here. They are actually here.

  Fron, she says. Who’d have thought that we’d end up trying to start up in Fron?

  He jerks suddenly, lunges, and he’s sick, violently and red in the coat scuttle. He whips the tea towel off her foot and holds it against his mouth. Vomits again. She sighs. He retches. Then she laughs. So does he.

  Exactly how we met, she says.

  When she wakes in the morning she is alone. His side of the bed is cold. She takes in the room. There is no daylight, and she wonders for the time. She’d counted five clocks in the house last night, all stopped at different times. Twenty past four. Quarter past eight. She lies there waiting. He will bring her coffee soon. They will make love. They will talk about how to fill the day. Ten to seven. Just after nine. They will go outside. He will show her the things he has talked about so often, the views he’s created in her mind. Five to twelve. She cannot believe they are actually here. It is primitive. Way beyond. Fron.

  She doesn’t know if she can do this. This is too far away.

  She needs to use the bathroom. Swings her legs out of the bed, is surprised to find she is dressed. Leggings. T-shirt. She cannot remember putting these back on. She remembers her foot, looks down and sees nothing. She sits back on the bed and lifts her foot to check again. No red mark. No blister. She listens. Looks about the room. Michael?

  Silence replies.

  She pads along the small landing where an electric heater ticks out a waft of warm air. She finds comfort in the heat, stands there, for a second or two, warming her feet. Then she calls him again.

  Michael?

  This time she questions him, like she has always done. Like he her.

  Will you leave her?

  Will you leave him?

  There is still so much to tell each other.

  I have a place, in the hills, under the sky. No one will know we are there.

  Are you embarrassed of me, Michael?

  No. But I do want to run away with you.

  She must use the bathroom. She hovers over the toilet for the seat is icy cold. Smells the damp up above, down below. This place is awful, she thinks. Wills herself to think of it otherwise. Lives left behind. Lives started again. Living like dormice, fucking like rabbits.

  Michael? Her voice is more determined.

  She goes downstairs. A shaft of daylight shimmers on the carpet in front of her. Dust dances within it. She sees pictures now, on the wall, three brown-haired boys and the lone blue-eyed girl that would leave school to bear a child no one knew what to do with; all in slate-grey uniforms and drawn-on smiles. Another clock. One she had not seen last night. Twenty-five past five. Two hands entwined on the same number.

  Michael?

  She goes into the small living room. Finds the tea towel on the carpet but the coal scuttle is empty and scrubbed clean. She holds up the tea towel with her fingertips and can see no evidence of the night’s events.

  There would be no room for a child anyway. Two people is even too many.

  Michael?

  Afraid now. She goes into the smaller room at the back of the house. On the table, a full glass of red wine and a bouquet of nettles. There is no fire. The stone floor underneath feels made of ice. In the tiny kitchen, everything as it was, as if she had not even arrived. She looks inside the kettle with half-slit eyes and is relieved to find it empty.

  He has gone to get supplies, she tells herself, filling the kettle with the cold, cold water from the tap. This was his home, where he grew up, he will have gone to knock on a neighbour, inform them of his return. She will meet them later. You and your fancy bright life, they will say. You won’t last five minutes up here. She drops a teabag into a mug. Opens the fridge for the milk and it’s not there. She looks down into the bag of shopping she’d brought with her last night and the two pints are not there either.

  Goddamn you, Michael.

  He has drunk the milk. He has gone to get milk. She goes back upstairs to shower.

  ~

  She dresses in his clothes. Thinks about unpacking a case. She opens the wardrobe and coughs at the dust. She remembers the shopping list. Cleaning products. Freezer items. Plenty of wine. They are just three weeks into January and he has told her of harsh winters frozen in, of cracked lips and cold sores, of journeys never made. She descends the stairs as she would a hill, on the balls of her feet. Her mug of tea with the teabag still stewing waits for further instruction. Like she waits. She does not know what to do up here in Fron. How people are expected to live here when winter sets in. She pulls on her walking shoes. Thinks about her scalded foot. Removes the shoe, then the sock—it’s like nothing has happened. She puts the shoes back on. Grabs her jacket and opens the kitchen door.

  The fog weighs heavy. Something crows. She can barely see where she is and is afraid to go too far in case she should not find her way back. She takes small steps. That’s what they will do: take small steps. Twenty years of marriage for her. His second marriage for him. She thanks God again for not giving her children. Thinks of Michael’s daughter who didn’t make it past four. Damage limitation, they’d called it. She was a very poorly soul. She’d watched her husband pack her cases himself and put them into the boot of her car.

  That’s it?

  That’s it. You must do what you have to do.

  He even shakes her hand and thanks her for giving it a go.

  She turns to look back at the cottage. She has barely gone a few metres and yet it seems like miles away. Whitewashed and desolate yet smoke pluming from the chimney. Neither fire was lit when she left. Michael must be back. She wonders when he passed her and how they’d missed each other. Just think, she would say, if you’d not looked at me as I’d looked at you. We would have missed each other. We would never have known. She pulls her jacket tighter and heads back towards the little cottage under the hill she now cannot see for the fog.

  She opens the back door and stamps her feet on a doormat as if they are caked in snow.

  Michael? She blows into her hands. Michael?

  In the dining room the glass of red, the nettles lying beside. In the living room, the tea towel where she’d left it on the floor. Both fires out.

  Michael?

  She runs back outside. It doesn’t matter how far or if she can make her way back, she just needs to see, see it again from over here and sure enough, smoke, billowing now, from the chimney of the little cottage under the hill she cannot see for the fog. She runs back to the house.

  Michael!

  Glass of red on the table with the nettles lying beside. In the living room the tea towel where she’d left it on the floor.

  Michael?

  She wonders if there is another room she doesn’t know about.

  She wonders how six people coped with icicles as perilous as thorns.

  She runs back outside and to her car, cups her hand against the window and sees only a map on the passenger seat, a blunt red line around the contours of Fron.

  She runs back to the house for her keys. She will go looking for him. As he said he would look for her. Because this is it now, this is us.

  He is hiding her away.

  She finds her handbag and finds her keys, runs back to the car. She starts to drive. The fog is everywhere and everywhere there is fog, but she can just make out the lane straight ahead. She’s afraid to blink. She wipes her nose, is astonished to find she is cr
ying, and punches the glovebox open to find tissues. She drives and she drives and feels the lane lowering, as if she is sinking, as if the world below is devouring her. She puts her foot down. She can see more clearly now and yes, there is the grey pencil line of the sea; the darker blunter pencil that colours in the sky. Doll-white cottages dotted here, dotted there. Like a world without sides up here. Hell up high. She curses him.

  Fuck you, Michael. You wanted this. You wanted this. They were just looks, Michael. Nosy parkers and blabbermouths. We would have survived.

  And drives faster, looking for life.

  A house on the roadside. She runs to it, hammers on the door. A shadow forms, in the frosted glass, a key is turned. A man, old and hunched in holed clothes and slippers.

  Michael, she spits. Michael Connolly. Have you seen him?

  The old man cups a hand around his ear.

  Michael Connolly, she shouts. From Fron. Have you seen him?

  The old man says something, holds out his hands. She says his name again—Michael Connolly—and points to the sky around her—from Fron, Fron—and the old man looks concerned, says something she cannot understand. He is Welsh. She cannot speak Welsh, doesn’t understand Welsh. She throws her hands over her head and runs back to the car. When she looks back the door has been closed and the old man has gone. Like he too was never there.

  She drives further down the lane that feels far longer than how it felt last night when she’d arrived. When she’d driven, heart in mouth, map on seat, a red line circling the word Fron, and smiling. She had found him. He’d treated her scalded ankle in A&E then thrown up in a bedpan with the winter vomiting bug.

  Who looks after you? she’d asked.

  He’d sent her a bunch of nettles the next day. Broken the rules, found her address. You’ve stung me, the card said.

  Later, he tells her where they can go. Fron, he says, where he’s from. Hills like breasts. Fog like a beast. He holds onto her shoulders as he convinces her. Sucks on her like a child.

  And then she sees him. He’s there, just up ahead in a field, and he holds onto a little girl’s hand. She is skipping. She wears wellington boots. Her hair, she swears, is pure gold. He bends down with her to look at something in the grass.

  She stops the car.

  They are picking nettles. It is a field of nettles they cannot feel. And the nettles will all be for her.

  She drives back to the little cottage sinking deeper into fog under the hill. She repacks the car and leaves him no note. She is not sorry and has no regrets. As she drives past the field she sees him still there and this time he turns and waves.

  She tells herself: there was no scalded foot. No dead mouse in the kettle, and the clocks had all stopped for the Connollys up in Fron as the smoke filled each little room and took their lives one by one. He had gone home as they had all gone home. His mother’s last Christmas, the father long gone; three brothers. The sister. To draw up a contract. To say their goodbyes. None of them ever meant to set this world alight.

  It’s freezing in here, Mother. Light the fire.

  It’s not that cold, Michael. Put a jumper on. Anyway, I think the seal’s gone.

  The sister mocks: And you’re the one who wants to live in this place?

  I do.

  You won’t survive the night.

  That’s why I’m lighting the fire.

  Don’t light the fire, Michael. Please don’t light the fire.

  Too late.

  But the fire burned much later.

  She stops the car. This must be it. It has to be it. For there is the view and there is the little cottage under the hill over there. Where we will start again, he’d said. Just as the road ends.

  She lifts the box from the well of the passenger seat and heads back towards that nowhere called Fron, scattering him all the way.

  Abdul

  ON PAPER HE IS a sixteen-year-old Afghan asylum-seeker who has been in the country for three weeks. He made it over on the ferry having been in the Jungle for three months, and there was a passport, relevant documentation. Medical reports have suggested slight symptoms of asthma but no significant trauma. Health otherwise good. He is 1.84 metres in height, weighs just shy of ten stone, statistically speaking he is a human eel, a critically endangered species. Personal belongings: prayer mat, Koran. His name is Abdul. He was born on January 1st 2000 and, like the rest of the millennium bugs that didn’t spread, he will slip from the system and have no file.

  He is not afraid to look me straight in the eye and, as he does, he shakes my hand though it is all beyond my grasp. I present my ID card—I’m a social worker, that’s all—yet he takes me for an official. So the handshake stops and the eyes flick down to the concrete. He seems to be counting pebbles. One pebble. Two pebbles. Takes interest in a slug. I ask for his belongings, what I might put in the car. He carries a white plastic bag like a clutch and unravels it to scoop out what he has. Prayer mat. Koran. Chewing gum. A watch that he straps to his right wrist. He is left-handed and clean-shaven—does he need to shave yet?—and, though he smells like a bathed baby, the air is filled with something so potent I spend a long time trying to place it. The clothes he now wears are donated. The shirt is black and too big. The jeans are old-fashioned. His hair clipped close to his scalp. He leads. I follow. Even from behind he does not look sixteen.

  He knows what to do in the car. How to use a seat belt. How to adjust the seat so that he has more leg room. He does not remove his coat. It is October. We are getting sunsets the colour of slit eels. Yet he shivers, this human eel who’s slipped into the net; blows into his hands. I turn up the heater. Buckle myself in. I am his chauffeur, I think. Just a cabbie with a fare.

  I explain to Abdul that our journey will take around four hours, but given the time of day we are likely to hit Birmingham we could be looking at six. When I use the word traffic I’m really careful not to sound as if it ends with a strong k. I am speaking clearly but not like he’s a child and I make no hand gestures to support my words. I notice that there is a scar on his right hand between his thumb and his forefinger; the sort made should you have grabbed a blade to stop it from going any closer to your body. There is also a scar on his neck that looks as recent as the one on his hand. He’s already been hooked up and fresh skin has yet to heal his wounds.

  When I say his name, he doesn’t seem to hear it, nor does he care for my thoughts on rural Kent. I have not been to Afghanistan so we share no common ground, and I regret not making a list of things to talk about. Moving does not suit me either, I want to say. In fact, the older I get, the less of the world I want to see. I turn on the car radio while I’m thinking of what to say. Abdul jumps out of his skin and sheds it. I watch it slip into the gulley of the passenger seat and start to ferment under the heater. Eels can swim backwards you know, I want to say. So you’re going to have to get a grip else they’ll throw you back into the sea.

  Except he is telling me something. The Taliban smash car windows to remove car radios is what he is trying to tell me with his fists. And the music here is shit, he says.

  He pulls out a mobile phone. There is something he wants to show me. He turns down the radio.

  This my music, he says. We have at weddings.

  For the first time I wonder if he’s married. If that marriage has also borne a child.

  We listen to his music as if dancing around each other, avoiding the other one’s eyes.

  So, I say. You were three months in the Jungle.

  He looks out of the window.

  Were you there by yourself? With family? Friends?

  He is still looking out of the window.

  Can I ask how you got there? To the Jungle?

  I walk, he says.

  That’s a long walk, I say. A very long walk.

  Yes, he agrees. Very long.

  No boat? Truck? Just walking?

  Yes, he says again. Just walk.

  Once they’ve crossed the Channel, they are nine times out of ten take
n to a warehouse facility in rural Kent where they are kept. Which is how everyone speaks of it. As if they are asking you to keep the change. Which makes me think of the pound. He’s being kept in Kent, they will say, while councils wrangle over who’s having who. After the tests and assessments determine their truths and their lies in these austere times. After their clothes are incinerated and their lives stripped bare. And it should not matter. It should not matter. And I realise that was the smell I was trying to place. Burning fabric. A mass cremation of the clothes off their backs.

  We give you money for more clothes, I say.

  In Birmingham? he asks. He says it as if it’s spelt with an ‘a’ and not an ‘i’ when he cannot use the ‘I’ when he’s to become one of them.

  We’re not going to Birmingham, I say. We only pass through Birmingham but do not stop. You can buy clothes in Stoke. Tomorrow. A translator will take you shopping. For food. For clothes.

  Things he will like. Things that will give him back his I.

  Abdul is thinking about this. He has a very defined jawbone, long drawn out cheeks. His eyes are flecked with the sort of brown you associate with a stray hound.

  Not Birmingham? he asks.

  No, I say. Stoke. Near Birmingham.

  I have no map. I should’ve brought a map. Blankets. Food. More kindness.

  How far the Birmingham? he asks.

  He is agitated. His eyebrows knit. He clenches fists. I tell him one hour.

  One hour? he repeats. Because time is everything. It’s all he has.

  Yes, I say. Birmingham is one hour from Stoke. Where we are going.

  He says this over and over. One hour. One hour. Like a mantra. Like something he must not forget.