Her flight comes up and she boards. A glass of complimentary champagne, pull back from the stand, a short taxi, those big turbines kick in and she is lifted from the surface of the earth. An hour later she is eating corn-fed chicken, wild-mushroom sauce and baby fennel as night streams past outside. She falls into a deep sleep where she dreams not the old dream of crashing and burning but a new dream of cruising forever in the radiation and the hard light and the deep cold and when she wakes they are banking over the reservoirs of Hertfordshire on their descent into Heathrow.
The train clatters north from Euston. The deep chime of the familiar. Chained dogs in scrapyards, level crossings, countryside like a postcard, all her history lessons written on the landscape, Maundy money and “Ring a Ring o’ Roses.” She should have called ahead. At least this way she can creep up on the place from downwind, see what it looks like when it doesn’t know she’s watching then turn round and move on if that’s what feels right.
She gets out of the taxi and stands on Grace Road, looking across the big grass triangle that sits at the centre of the estate, tower blocks on two sides, a row of shops on the third, a playground in the centre, the kind of place which must have looked fantastic as an architectural model before it got built and real human beings moved in.
There is a Nisa Local, there is chip shop called the Frying Squad. Between the two is the Bernie Cavell Advice Centre. Two boys are doing BMX stunts on the big rock in the centre of the pedestrian precinct which they used to call the Meteorite. She turns left and walks past Franklin Tower, the smell from the bins still rancid in the December chill.
17 Watts Road. A shattered slate lies on the path in front of the house. It’s mid-afternoon but behind the dirty glass all the curtains are closed. The bell isn’t working. She raps the letter box, waits then raps it again but gets no reply. Something passes through her. Despair or relief, she can’t tell. She crouches and looks through the slot. It is dark and cold in the hallway, some faint urinous scent.
“Mum…!” Briefly she is nine again, wearing a green duffel coat and those crappy socks which slid down under your heel inside your Wellingtons. She raps the letter box for a third time. “Hello…?”
She checks that no one is watching then breaks the glass with her elbow, the way it’s done in films. She reaches through the broken pane and feels a shiver of fear that someone or something is going to grab her hand from inside. She slips off the safety chain and turns the latch.
The smell is stronger in the hallway, damp, unclean. There is a fallen pagoda of post on the phone table and grey fluff packs out the angle between the carpet and the skirting board. Here and there wallpaper has come away from the damp plaster. Can she hear something moving upstairs or is it her imagination?
“Mum…?”
The only light in the living room is a thin blade of weak sun that cuts between the curtains. She stops on the threshold. A body is lying on the floor. It is too small to be her mother, the clothes too ragged. She has never seen a corpse before. To her surprise what she feels, mostly, is anger, that someone has been squatting in her mother’s house and that she now has to sort out the resulting mess. She covers her nose and mouth with her sleeve, walks around the room and crouches for a closer look. The woman is older than she expects. She lies on a stained mattress, knotted grey hair, dirty nails, a soiled blue cardigan and a long skirt in heavy green corduroy. Only when she recognises the skirt does she realise that she is looking at her mother.
“Oh Jesus.”
She wants to run away, to pretend that she was never here, that this never happened. But she has to inform the police. She has to ring her sister. She crouches, waiting for her pulse to slow and the dizziness to pass. As she is getting to her feet, however, her mother’s eyes spring open like the wooden eyes of a puppet.
“Holy fuck!” She falls backwards, catching her foot and cracking her head against the fire surround.
“Who are you?” says her mother, panicking, eyes wide.
She can’t speak.
“I haven’t got anything worth stealing.” Her mother stops and narrows her eyes. “Do I know you?”
She has to call an ambulance but her mind has gone blank and she can’t remember the emergency number in the UK.
“It’s Carol, isn’t it?” Her mother grips the arm of the sofa and lifts herself slowly onto her knees. “You’ve changed your hair.” She gathers herself and stands up. “You’re meant to be in America.”
“I thought you were dead.”
“I was asleep.”
“You were on the floor.” The back of her head is throbbing.
“I was on the mattress.”
“It’s the middle of the day.”
“I have trouble with the stairs.”
Dust lies thick on every horizontal surface. The framed Constable poster is propped beneath the rectangle of unbleached wallpaper where it used to hang, the glass cracked across the middle.
“I thought you hated us,” says her mother. “I thought you were going to stay away forever.”
This is the room where she and Robyn ate tomato soup and toast fingers in front of Magpie and Ace of Wands. This was where they played Mousetrap and threw a sheet over the coffee table to make a cave. “What happened?”
“I was asleep.”
“To the house. To you.”
“Your father died.”
“And then what?”
There was a lime tree just beyond the back fence. It filled the side window and when the wind gusted all the leaves flipped and changed colour like a shoal of fish. The window is now covered with a sheet of plywood.
“How did you get in?” says her mother.
“Mum, when did you last have a bath?”
“I spent forty-three years looking after your father.”
“I can actually smell you.”
“Enough housework to last a lifetime.”
“Does Robyn know about all this?”
“Then I no longer had to keep him happy. Not that I ever succeeded in keeping your father happy.”
“She never said anything.”
“I prefer not to go out. Everyone is so fat. They have electric signs that tell you when the next bus is coming. I should make you a cup of tea.” And with that she is gone, off to make God alone knows what bacterial concoction.
Carol picks the papier-mâché giraffe from the windowsill and blows the dust off. She can still feel the dry warmth of Miss Calloway’s hands wrapped around her own as they shaped the coat-hanger skeleton with the red pliers, coffee and biscuits on her breath from the staffroom at break. “Come on, squeeze.”
She asks the woman behind the till in the Nisa for the number of a local taxi firm and rings from a call box. Sitting on a bench waiting for the cab she remembers the street party they held to celebrate the wedding of Charles and Diana in July of 1981, everyone getting drunk and dancing to Kim Wilde and the Specials on a crappy PA in the bus shelter. This town…is coming like a ghost town.
There were trestle tables down the centre of Maillard Road but no timetable beyond a rendition of “God Save the Queen” and a half-hearted speech by a local councillor which was rapidly drowned out by catcalls. The atmosphere became rowdier as the day went on, the older people dispersing around nightfall when the air of carnival turned sinister. She remembers a woman sitting on the grass and weeping openly. She remembers Yamin’s terrifying older brother having sex with Tracey Hollywood on the roundabout while his mates whooped and spun it as fast as they could. She remembers the Sheehan twins firing rockets across the field until the police arrived, then starting up again when they left. For months afterwards you would find little plastic Union Jacks and lager cans and serviettes bearing pictures of the royal couple wedged into the nettles at the edge of the football pitch and stuck behind the chicken-wire fence around Leadbitter’s Bakery.
She remembers how Helen Weller’s brother jumped from a seventh-floor balcony in Cavendish Tower one Christmas while high on mushroom
s, equipped only with a Spider-Man bedsheet. She remembers Cacharel and strawberry Nesquik and Boney M singing “Ra Ra Rasputin.” She remembers how her father would stand at the front window staring out on all of this and say, Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair. Only many years later did she realise that he hadn’t made the phrase up himself, though whether he was pretending to be Shelley or Ozymandias she still doesn’t know.
Robyn is taking wet washing from the machine. The dryer churns and rumbles. Through the half-opened concertina doors Carol can see the children watching Futurama. Fergal, Clare and Libby. She can never remember which girl is which. There are crayon pictures in cheap clip frames. There are five tennis rackets and a space hopper and a dead rubber plant and two cats. The clutter makes Carol feel ill. “Jesus, Robyn, how did you let it happen?”
“I didn’t let anything happen.”
“I’m pretty certain she’d wet herself.”
“So you got her undressed and put her into the bath and helped her into some clean clothes?”
Robyn has put on two stone at least. She seems fuzzier, less distinct.
“Six years. Shit, Carol. Why didn’t you tell us you were coming?”
“She’s my mother, too.”
“Christmas cards, the odd email.” Robyn slams the washing-machine door and hefts the laundry basket onto a chair.
“Let’s not do this.”
“Do what? Draw attention to the fact that you waltzed off into the sunset?”
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
“You never asked.”
“Asked what? ‘Has Mum gone crazy?’ ”
“She’s not crazy and you never asked about anything.”
The argument is unexpectedly satisfying, like getting a ruler under a plaster and scratching the itchy, unwashed flesh. “This is not about scoring points. This is about our mother who is sleeping on the floor in a house full of shit.”
“You didn’t come back when Dad was dying.”
“We were in Minnesota. We were in the middle of nowhere. I didn’t get your message till we got back to Boston. You know that.”
“You didn’t come to his funeral.”
Carol knows she should let it go. Her life has exceeded Robyn’s in so many ways that her sister deserves this small moral victory, but it niggles, because the story is true. She remembers it so clearly. There were eagles above the lake and chipmunks skittering over the roof of the cabin. Every room smelt of cedar. Down at the lakeside a red boat was roped to a wooden quay. She can still hear the putter of the outboard and the slap of waves against the aluminium hull. “How often does she get out?”
“I pop in on Tuesdays and Thursdays after work and do her a Sainsbury’s shop on Saturday morning.”
“So she never goes out?”
“I make sure she doesn’t starve to death.” Robyn looks at her for a long moment. “How’s Aysha, Carol?”
How can Robyn tell? This X-ray vision, her ability to home in on a weakness. Is it being a mother, spending your life servicing other people’s needs? “Aysha’s fine. As far as I know.”
Robyn nods but doesn’t offer any sisterly consolation. “Secondaries in his lungs and bone marrow. They sewed him up and sent him to the hospice.”
“I know.”
“No, Carol. You don’t know.” Robyn picks out three pairs of socks and drapes them over the radiator below the window. “He collapsed in the bathroom, his trousers round his ankles.”
“You don’t need to do this.”
“The doctor was amazed he’d managed to keep it hidden for so long.” She takes a deep breath. “I’ve always pictured you sitting in the corner of the kitchen with your hands over your ears while the phone rings and rings and rings.” The dining table is covered in half-made Christmas cards, glitter glue and safety scissors and cardboard Santas. “Sometimes people need you,” says Robyn. “It might be inconvenient and unpleasant but you just do it.”
She books into the Premier Inn and eats a sub-standard lasagne. Her body is still on Eastern Standard Time so she sits in her tiny room and tries to read the Sarah Waters she bought at the airport but finds herself thinking instead about her father’s last days, that short steep slope from diagnosis to death.
Lake Toba in Sumatra used to be a volcano. When it erupted 70,000 years ago the planet was plunged into winter for a decade and human beings nearly died out. The meteorite that killed the dinosaurs was only six miles across. The flu epidemic at the end of the First World War killed 5 percent of the world’s population. Some fathers told their little girls about Goldilocks and Jack and the Beanstalk, but what use were stories? These were facts. We were hanging on by the skin of our teeth and there was nowhere else to go in spite of the messages you might have picked up from Star Trek and Doctor Who. She remembers Robyn weeping and running from the room.
He left school at sixteen then spent thirty years building and decorating. Damp rot, loft conversions, engineered wood flooring. He liked poetry that rhymed and novels with plots and pop science with no maths. He hated politicians and refused to watch television. He said, “Your mother and your sister believe the world’s problems could be solved if people were polite to one another.”
Which is why he didn’t want her to leave, of course. He was terrified that she’d get far enough away to look back and see how small he was, a bullying, bar-room philosopher not brave enough to go back to college for fear he might get into an argument with people who knew more than he did.
Pancreatic cancer at fifty-seven. “All that anger. It turns on you in the end,” was Aysha’s posthumous diagnosis and for once Carol was tempted to agree with what she’d normally dismiss as hippy bullshit.
Sometimes, on the edge of sleep, when worlds overlap, she slips back forty years and sees the sun-shaped, bronze-effect wall clock over the fireplace and feels the warmth of brushed cotton pyjamas straight from the airing cupboard and her heart goes over a humpbacked bridge. Then she remembers the smell of fried food and the small-mindedness and her desperation to be gone.
She presses her forehead against the cold glass of the hotel window and looks down into the car park where rain is pouring through cones of orange light below the streetlamps. She is back in one of the distant outposts of the empire, roughnecks and strange gods and the trade routes petering out.
She abandoned her mother. That hideous house. She has to make amends somehow.
She climbs into bed and floats for eight hours in a great darkness lit every so often by bright little dreams in which Aysha looms large. The dimples at the base of her spine, the oniony sweat which Carol hated then found intoxicating then hated once more, the way she held Carol’s wrists a little too tight when they were making love.
They met at an alumni fund-raiser about which she remembered very little apart from the short, muscular woman with four silver rings in the rim of her ear and a tight white T-shirt who materialised in front of her with a tray of canapés and a scowl, after which all other details of the evening were burned away.
She had the air of someone walking coolly away from an explosion, all shoulder roll and flames in the background. A brief marriage to the alcoholic Tyler. RIP, thank God. Three years on the USS John C. Stennis—seaman recruit E-1, culinary specialist, honourable discharge. A mother who spoke in actual tongues at a Baptist church in Oklahoma. Somewhere in the background, the Choctaw Trail of Tears, the Irish potato famine and the slave ports of Senegambia if Aysha’s account of her heritage was to be believed, which it probably wasn’t, though she had the hardscrabble mongrel look. And if the powers that be had tried to wipe out your history you probably deserved to rewrite some of it yourself. She was self-educated, with more enthusiasm than focus. Evening classes in philosophy, Dan Brown and Andrea Dworkin actually touching on the bookshelf, a box set of Carl Sagan’s Cosmos.
Two months later they were in the Hotel de la Bretonnerie in the Marais, Aysha’s first time outside the States unprotected by fighter aircraft. Aysha had gone suffici
ently native to swap Marlboro for Gitanes but she was sticking to the Diet Coke. They were sitting outside a little café near the Musée Carnavalet.
Aysha said, “Thank you.”
“You don’t owe me anything,” said Carol.
“Hey, lover.” Aysha held her eye. “Loosen up.”
The following morning she hires a Renault Clio and drives to the house via B&Q and Sainsbury’s. Her mother is awake but doesn’t recognise Carol at first and seems to have forgotten their meeting of the previous day, but perhaps the back foot is a good place for her to be on this particular morning. Carol dumps her suitcases in the hall, turns the heating on and bleeds the radiators with the little brass key which, thirty years on, still lies in the basket on top of the fridge. The stinky hiss of the long-trapped air, the oily water clanking and gurgling its way up through the house.
“What are you doing?” asks her mother.
“Making you a little warmer.”
She rings a glazier for the broken window.
“I’ve changed my mind,” says her mother. “I don’t like you being here.”
“Trust me.” She can’t bring herself to touch the dirty cardigan. “It’s going to be OK.”
The noises are coming from the built-in cupboard in the bedroom she and Robyn once shared. Scratching, cooing. She shuts the landing door, opens the windows and arms herself with a broom. When she pulls the handle back they explode into the room, filling the air with wings and claws and machine-gun clatter. She covers her face but one of them still gashes her neck in passing. She swings the broom. “Fuck…!” They bang against the dirty glass. One finds the open window, then another. She hits a third and it spins on the ground, its wing broken. She throws a pillow over it, stamps on the pillow till it stops moving then pushes pillow and bird out of the window into the garden.