by Laura Beatty
Inside it was darkish and smelt close, like a burrow. One bar of the gas fire was on, even though it was summer, and beside it, in an armchair, sat a woman as old as Buster. She leant over the armrest, twisting round to see them as they came in. That you, Steve? On her head there was greasy-looking lilac bonnet, a knitted beret, from which her hair dangled to just below her chin.
That’s us. Got your hat on, Mother?
I’m going to have my hair done. She made a girlish gesture with the hand that wasn’t leaning, cupping her hair ends briefly. Going into town. Tender Touch are taking me. Who’s that you’ve got there?
This is Anne. Anne, meet Mother.
That was nice, Anne thought, to be introduced like that, like she was someone. Very nice. She put out her hand and then waved doubtfully. She didn’t know what else to do.
Anne’s come for one of your breakfasts.
Mother nodded. I make a nice breakfast, don’t I Steve?
The best.
There was no sign of Mother fixing anything up, so Steve cooked eggs and toast and frankfurters and baked beans. He didn’t seem surprised. They ate it in the living room with Mother.
Nothing like one of Mother’s bloody breakfasts I tell you. You get that down you.
Anne did.
Nice and quiet in the bungalow. Just the liquid sounds of food being eaten. In and out, slurp, slop and swallow. And breathing; Buster, for instance, snoring under the table.
After a while Mother craned even further forward out of her chair. What’s that you’re eating? Steve’s jaws came to a halt, as though a machine had been switched off. He had both his elbows on the table either side of his plate. His massive shoulders were leant right over, for the purpose of shovelling. It was only his forearm that moved at all, Anne noticed. In fact it was all in the wrist. Also he could fit an entire frankfurter in his mouth at one go. He bent it against the inside of his cheek and just flipped it in.
We’re eating your breakfast, Mother.
Steve resumed chewing, swallowed. He even ate like a cow, Anne thought, slow and vacant and contented. She gobbled. She couldn’t help it.
I tell you what – Steve pointed at his food with his fork – no one makes a better breakfast than Mother. Do they, Mother?
Mother looked pleased with herself. No, they didn’t. She fingered her hair again, shook her hair at Anne. No one did. She would have made them a good breakfast. She would have made them something if they hadn’t put that pylon up. She jerked her head in the bonnet towards the back of the bungalow. We had veggies out there before they put that pylon up, before Bill died.
Mother was sensitive to it. It didn’t bother Steve. He didn’t even notice it. She hadn’t been well ever since they’d put up the pylon. That was right, wasn’t it? How long was it? – three year?
Makes my head buzz. Mother passed her hand across the top of her eyes, nodding her head to herself as though something had lodged inside it. They put a pylon in your garden yet?
No, Anne said. Not yet. She was going to have veggies too. When she’d planted them. She’d got seeds.
Bring us some when they’re up. I like veggies.
I will.
Then there was silence. Anne looked at Steve’s empty plate. He might eat slowly but he got through a fair pile. She looked from the plate to the man, and back and forth several times as though unable to believe so much food had been shifted at one sitting. Quantity impressive. Quantity of breakfast very impressive. Steve sat motionless and glazed. Problems with internal traffic. He was busy governing airflow, Anne could see that. The down-thrust and the up-thrust fighting it out. She could hear it even – wheezing sounds, a faint hiss of air escaping or a gurgle as something accelerated past some hidden obstruction. His cheeks puffed out now and then. And sometimes his top half convulsed briefly and with violence. Pardon.
Eventually – did Mother want anything to eat?
She used to eat like a horse, Mother did, when they grew their own. You wouldn’t believe it. Anne thought she would believe anything now she’d seen Steve actually do it, eat a week’s breakfast in one sitting. Mother had her own teeth then, mind, in those days. Not that she didn’t now, Steve said proudly, she had a bridge, didn’t she, so there must be something of her own still there. Some of her own bloody teeth for the bridge to fix on to. Pardon.
Mother swivelled her neck like an owl, bared the bridge for Anne to admire. She might have some of them carrots and a piece of white bread, if she had time.
Course she had time. Couldn’t do them any harm to wait five minutes while she ate her carrots, could it? You had to eat. Keep your bloody strength up.
He got up and fetched her a tin of carrots that he tipped cold, slop and all, into a bowl. She didn’t want them warmed, did she?
As they come, as they come.
On his way back to the table hissing and guffing. Pardon.
Twice Steve had to get up and go out to receive deliveries and Anne was left alone with Mother sucking the carrots across the bridge and down her gullet.
Had he got anything, this morning? she asked Anne in one of their silences.
A cat, Anne said. He shot a cat. She looked up to see Steve in the doorway.
It could have been a fox, Mother. Don’t go jumping to conclusions and don’t mention it to Smarty when he comes over.
Mother convulsed. The carrots slipped dangerously sideways and something orange and unspeakable flew out of her mouth. She was laughing, evidently.
Don’t you let on he shot a cat. He only got paid for the vermin.
Well, cats are bloody vermin if you ask me.
Can’t argue with that. Can’t argue with that. The carrots became the focus of Mother’s attention once more. Steve manoeuvred himself back into his seat at the table and resumed glazedness and fixity. Just the noise of the carrots over the bridge again and the air. Pardon.
When she’d finished Mother looked round at Anne. He’s killed men, you know.
Shush, Mother.
He’s shot a lot of men. He used to be in the Forklinds. Special Forces.
Anne looked from Mother to Steve and back again. What to say. She had a feeling of recognition about Forklinds, but dim, very dim. Buster dreamed of rabbits and an extra leg. Otherwise silence.
He can’t have no furniture round his bed. You watch out, if that’s where you think you’re headed. He wakes up and tries to strangle you in the night. His wife left him, didn’t she, Steve? She left. Take more than that to scare me off. He’s not strangling me.
That’s enough, Mother. Those speaking, bovine eyes. Anne doesn’t want to hear our troubles.
Time to go maybe, although it was hard to tear yourself away from your first friends. That was what they were, wasn’t it?
Back down the track on foot, turning it all over in your mind. Cross the road and along and up the field, further than you thought but not too far after all. Past the cat still in the hedge and it must be, what, mid-afternoon? Back to the hut. That was something after all, your own hut and the quiet and no pylon clicking like a cricket above your head yet, just the birds and the leaves and the sweet woodland air.
♦
Anne got into the habit of spending her days away from the clearing. She wandered further afield now and more openly. She would go out first thing, milk, then lie in the ditch and watch her father. He saw her once, blinked like an owl, skidded to a stop.
What are you doing there?
Anne stood up like she’d done something wrong. Nothing, Dad. I’m not doing anything.
She might have said, living, instead. She might have said I’m just living if you don’t mind, but she didn’t. They looked at each other. A car passed between them. He didn’t cross the road or anything. You alright then? he asked, after it had gone. Anne nodded, shrugged, I’m fine. I’ve got a house, Dad. He went on standing there, just looking at her. He didn’t ask where. After a bit he said, Well, can’t stand here all day. I’ll be late at this rate. As if it was her fault.
He wound the pedal round with his foot.
Alright?
Alright, Dad.
She raised a hand. He was poised to go.
Don’t let your mother see you looking like that. Then he was speeding down the hill to the cruddy old chicken plant like always.
It was nice seeing her dad. Even if he was useless.
♦
She did a lot of watching in the day. Often, after that, she’d wave and he’d take a hand gingerly off the handlebars and give her a little wave back. Sometimes Alright? would float back to her over his shoulder, thin on the air with the speed of his passage as he shot by. Alright, Dad, she’d answer to herself, as he rounded the corner. It was comforting.
One day he stopped again, did his chicken-head look up and down the road and waddled his bike across to her. Bit of something extra, he said, and he gave her a tinfoil package before he mounted again and was gone.
That was a lovely day, opening the package in the sun on the bank, tomato ketchup and toast and she ate it right there and then. Afterwards she lay on her back and watched the leaves against the sky and the comings and goings of the birds, and a mouse with something enormous in its mouth ran down her arm and under a bramble. Perhaps it was her birthday or something. Who knew?
Sometimes she’d come back to the bank in the day and watch the rest of her family go to and fro up the hill past the wood. Mum in the car with Leanne and Connor, off to town. Michael and John on their bikes. Miss Madam off on a date. Anne kept quiet. She didn’t want any of that lot seeing her. Only Connor saw her once and they waved at each other.
She wasn’t always so idle. The coppicing she’d done to open up the clearing sprang and grew like magic. You couldn’t keep it down. She had to dig round each stump and chop the roots out with an axe. It was back-breaking but she worked and worked to cut herself a patch. Just a small area at first, where there was least understorey, nothing sown yet, just ground clearance and protection against rabbits and deer. She fenced her plot, the size it would be when she’d finished, with a mixture of stakes and netting she’d found in a skip, strung with things to keep out the birds, anything she found on her wanders about the wood, dummies dropped out of babies’ mouths in the car park, yards of tape from a broken cassette hung with ringpulls. It looked wicked and it worked. You had to be clever to survive.
When she was out and about, trundling down the paths, to the car park or the woodland café, Anne would keep her eyes open. She had taken to picking things up, litter mostly, which she did out of gratitude to the wood, as a sort of service, but then you never knew what might come in handy. She wasn’t indiscriminate. She sorted it; it was like a job. The rubbish, she threw away in the car-park bins. The boxes or cartons that looked useful, she kept. She also kept the things that fell out of pushchairs, little teddies, books, plastic things that rattled or squeaked. Leanne had coloured plastic toys and soft toys. Lots of toys, Anne said to herself. Broken, some of them were. The ones that needed batteries that is, because Michael or John or Connor took the batteries out, lost the battery covers, and that was that usually. You needed toys if you were making a home. You couldn’t have a home without things in it and Anne had nothing to begin with. Obviously she had to have things.
They were hard to come by, the really good things. You didn’t find real things every day, so they were a rarity – Anne’s treasures. She put up shelves round the walls to hold them and she spent much time, on rainy days, arranging. She had her favourites, the lilac teddy with a loop out of the top of his head and the plastic keys in rainbow colours on a clip-together ring. Sometimes she’d change it round, demote something from a prominent position because something else, more important, had been found, like the day she saw a spouty cup with juice still in it. It was red and the spout had been chewed so that there were little threads and peaks of plastic, like fur almost, all over it. On the side there was a picture of a panda smiling and stepping out. Tommy Tippee. Anne drank the juice, which tasted of dribble, and put the cup in the middle of the shelf above her bed. That was a find, that was. She felt really pleased after that.
When she ran out of shelf space she hung things on nails. The lilac teddy came off the shelf and hung above the door. He was her lucky charm. The plastic keys showed better on a nail, anyway, so they went to the side of the door. That was a joke: plastic keys for her door. You didn’t just hang things anywhere, you hung them where they made sense. She sorted them by category: the useful, the decorative, the playthings and, smallest group of all, the objects of superstition. The most plentiful things were the teethers and comforters that fell out of babies’ hands or mouths. They had a category of their own, on account of their superior number. She had two lines of them, plastic totems, up the length of the stakes, from roof to floor. She looked forward to when the walls would be completely covered.
Now, out collecting, Anne redoubled her efforts. She didn’t dawdle along, watching the birds. She walked stooped and concentrating. She poked, with a stick, by the sides of the tracks, in the brambles and rushy grass in case she’d missed something. Once she’d picked up a comforter before the mother and buggy were properly past. She put it straight into her mouth – that was instinct, because sometimes they tasted of sugar or of pap. Then the mother had turned round, realising it was gone, just as Anne, having taken it out again, was holding it up for inspection. Nice one. Blue stopper with ring, clear teat. Little yellow ducks round the outside. It would hang nice.
Excuse me.
The mother gave her a murder-look. So vicious it left Anne with her mouth open. She snatched the comforter out of Anne’s hand, jolting the buggy so her baby cried. Anne heard – Some people and It’s not safe any more – before they disappeared. That’s got my spit on it, she thought, because the mother had put the dummy in her own mouth to clean it, before cramming it into the crying baby. Serve you right.
You couldn’t tell with the people in the wood, whether they would be nice or nasty. Sometimes people talked to her. Sometimes they looked like she wasn’t there. They were rude. Anne knew that. She wasn’t exactly invisible. Once, when she was busy like this, at her job again, putting rubbish in a carrier bag, a man came round the corner. He had a big black bin liner and grey hair tied in a ponytail. He was collecting, like her.
Morning.
The way he said it, like it was a gift. Puffing it out on the morning air and bending slightly in Anne’s direction. His smile, too, was a kind of benediction. How nice, he said, to see someone else doing their civic duty. He indicated his own bag, full of litter. Doing something for the common good. He collected a couple of times a week usually, how often did Anne collect – he’d never seen her before?
Every day. Anne collected nearly every day.
There was an awkward pause. Anne made half a move to go, only she couldn’t because he was in the way.
Every day? Every day? The man repeated her words. He laughed a little barking laugh. Something was wrong. The man seemed cross. He looked at Anne hard, like she’d done something naughty. It was a disgusting reflection on society that there was enough litter to make picking it up a daily task. He said it as if it was Anne’s fault. She should think about it – it could be that Anne, with her overzealous approach, was encouraging litter dropping. If people could rely on her to pick up after them, they might well drop more. One should be wary of encouraging delinquency.
Someone else’s dog lolloped past then, nose to the ground, back again, stopped, hooped itself to defecate. Dogs, dogs, dogs. The man swivelled, to look for its owner, stepping aside as she came up puffing. Morning. A second benediction. You will be scooping, I trust? The woman looked confused. She hadn’t understood. That was obvious. She gave a puzzled half-smile, made a sort of sound in the back of her throat and walked on.
It is on the pathway, he boomed after her. It’s on the pathway, madam. But she was disappearing fast.
Anne shifted from foot to foot. The thing that occupied her whole mind, the only thing that really m
attered to her was, What has he got in his bag. It made her uneasy, someone else collecting in the same wood, but she didn’t dare ask. Civic duty. She was puzzled by that one.
As if in apology, and because she didn’t know what else to say, she said hesitantly, I’ve left home, holding her own bag slightly behind her and out of sight. She didn’t know if he would want to check it.
It worked. The man’s face relaxed. He leant back on his heels, holding his hands and the bag, clasped in front of him. Superior again. He shook his head. Leaving home. Leaving home. We all think we leave home. But – he opened his free hand wide – home is Mother Earth. Home is where the heart is and we can’t leave the planet, can we? Oh no. We don’t leave home. None of us do that. He looked so pleased, bending forwards now, delighted really. Think about it.
He gave her a wink and went on his way, left her to this new job, her civic duty. He sang a song as he went. No words, just Pom Pom Pom, but loudly.
She saw him again, from time to time, and he would wink at her or make a saying. To labour and not to seek for any reward. God is in the little things. That rules me out then, Anne thought, but she knew that already. Mostly she had no idea what he was talking about. He bought her a drink once, in the woodland café. She wanted Pepsi Max but he bought her fizzy water. It said natural sparkling mineral water on the bottle. It was disgusting. She had to pour it out when he wasn’t looking.
His name was Nigel. She found that out when he bought her the drink. He couldn’t buy a lady a drink without knowing her name. Anne had stared at him. When she told him her name he held out his hand, saying his own and bowing slightly. He said, pleased to meet you, Anne, even though he’d met her several days before. Inside the café he’d patted her shoulder, telling the lady behind the counter in a loud voice so the other customers could hear, Anne will have a sparkling water if you please. Litter-picker extraordinaire. She needs refreshment.
