She boards up the hole in the wall where they have scratched their way in, takes two dead birds to the bin outside then stands in the silence and the fresh air, waiting for the adrenaline to ebb.
Back inside, the radiators are hot and the house is drying out, clicking and creaking like a galleon adjusting to a new wind. A damp jungle smell hangs in the air. Plaster, paper, wood, steam, fungus.
“This is my home,” her mother says. “You cannot do this.”
“You’ll get an infection,” says Carol. “You’ll get hypothermia. You’ll have a fall. And I don’t want to explain to a doctor why I did nothing to stop it happening.”
She puts the curtains into the washing machine. She drags a damp mattress down the stairs and out onto the front lawn. Half the slats of the bed are broken so she takes it apart and dumps it on top of the mattress. She has momentum now. The carpet is mossy and green near the external wall so she pulls it up and cuts it into squares with blunt scissors. The underlay is powdery and makes her cough and coats her sweaty hands with a brown film. She levers up the wooden tack strips using a claw hammer. She adds everything to the growing pile outside. She sweeps and hoovers till the bare boards are clean, then takes the curtains out of the washing machine and hangs them over the banisters to dry.
She sponges the surface of the dining table and they eat lunch together on it, a steak-and-ale puff-pastry pie and a microwaved bag of pre-cut vegetables. Her mother’s anger has melted away. The lunchtime TV news is on in the background. “Who Wants to Be This and Get Me Out of That,” says her mother. “All those women with plastic faces. Terrorists and paedophiles. We called it ‘interfering with children.’ Frank, who worked in Everley’s, the shoe shop, he was one. I’m certain of that.” She stares into her plate for a long time. “A woman drowned herself in the canal last month. That little bridge on Jerusalem Street? Jackie Bolton. It was in the paper. You were at school with her daughter. Milly, I think her name was.” Carol has no memory of a Milly. “I’d go out more if I still lived in the countryside. There was a flagpole by the pond in the centre of the village. They put it up for the coronation. Your uncle Jack climbed all the way to the top and fell off and broke his collarbone.”
Carol must have heard the story twenty times. It is oddly comforting.
Her mother leans over and takes Carol’s hand. “I thought I might never see you again.”
Her skin has a sticky patina, like an old leather glove. “We need to get you into the bath.”
She is compliant until halfway up the stairs when she looks through the banisters and sees the uncarpeted boards in the bedroom. “You’re selling the house.”
“Don’t be ridiculous.” Carol laughs. “It’s not mine to sell.” She doesn’t say how little she thinks it would fetch, in this state, on this road.
“That’s why Robyn hates you being here.”
“Jesus Christ, Mum.” Carol is surprised by how angry she feels. “I could be in California, I could be working, but I’m stuck here on a shitty estate in the middle of nowhere trying to turn this dump back into a house before it kills you.”
“You thieving little…” She slaps Carol’s face with her free hand, loses her footing and for a second she is falling backwards down the stairs until Carol grabs her and hauls her upright.
“Shit.” Carol’s heart is hammering. In her mind’s eye her mother is lying folded and broken by the front door. She loosens her grip on the bony wrist. “Mum…?”
Her mother doesn’t reply. She is suddenly blank and distant. Carol should take her downstairs and sit her on the sofa but she might not get this chance again. She puts her hands on her mother’s arms and guides her gently up the last few steps.
She removes her mother’s shoes and socks. She peels off the soiled blue cardigan and unzips the dirty green corduroy skirt. Both are heavily stained and patched with compacted food. She takes off her mother’s blouse, unclips the grey bra and kicks all the clothing into the corner of the room. Her mother’s skin is busy with blotches and lesions in winey purples and toffee browns, the soft machinery of veins and tendons visible under the skin where it is stretched thin around her neck, at her elbows, above her breasts. The smell is rich and heady. Carol tries to imagine that she is dealing with an animal. She takes off her mother’s slip and knickers, perches her on the rim of the bath, lifts her legs in one by one then lowers her mother into the hot, soapy water. She flips the corduroy skirt over the pile of discarded clothing so she can’t see the brown streaks on the knickers then sits on the toilet seat. She’ll bin them later. “Hey. We did it.”
Her mother is silent for a long time. Then she says, “Mum filled a tin bath once a week. Dad got it first, then Delia, then me.” She is staring at something way beyond the wall of dirty white tiles. “There was a sampler over the dining table. Gran made it when she was a girl. ‘I saw an angel come down from heaven, having the key of the bottomless pit and a great chain in his hand.’ The angel locks the dragon in a pit for a thousand years. After that he must be ‘loosed a little season.’ ” She looks at Carol and smiles for the first time since she arrived. “Are you going to wash my hair?”
Carol makes them each a mug of coffee. Now that her mother is clean the room looks even more squalid. Old birthday cards, a china bulldog with a missing leg, mould in the ceiling corners, one of those houses cleared out post-mortem by operatives in boiler suits and paper masks.
They hear the click and twist of a key in the front door. Robyn is in the hallway. “There’s a pile of stuff outside.”
“I know.”
She steps into the living room and looks around. “What the hell are you doing, Carol?”
“Something you should have done a long time ago.”
“You can’t just ride in here like the fucking cavalry.” Robyn silently mouths the word fucking.
“What’s going on?” says her mother.
“There were pigeons in the bedroom,” says Carol.
“How long are you staying?” asks Robyn. “A week? Two weeks?”
“Carol?” says her mother. “What are you two arguing about?”
“Jesus,” says Robyn. “Fucking up your life doesn’t mean you can take over someone else’s instead.” This time she says the word out loud.
“Carol gave me a bath,” says her mother.
“Did you hurt her?”
It is too stupid a question to answer.
“Aysha rang me.” Robyn holds her eye for a long time. “Sounds like you left a trail of destruction in your wake.”
Carol assumes at first that she has misheard. Aysha talking to Robyn is inconceivable.
“She wanted to check you hadn’t killed yourself or been sectioned. I’m giving you the highlights. Some of the other stuff you probably don’t want to hear.”
“How did she get your number?” asks Carol.
“I presumed you’d given it to her in case of emergencies. Her being your partner.”
There is something barbed about the word partner but Carol isn’t sure who or what is being mocked.
“We’d have come to the wedding,” says Robyn. “I like weddings. I like America.”
“What are you both talking about?” says her mother.
“I’m taking Mum out for dinner,” says Carol, though the thought had not occurred to her until that moment.
Robyn stands close enough so that their mother can’t hear. “She’s not a toy, Carol. You can’t do this. You just can’t.”
Then she is gone.
“There’s too much going on.”
Carol looks around the half-empty Pizza Express.
“Too much noise,” says her mother. “Too many people.”
There is a low buzz of conversation, some cutlery-clatter. Rod Stewart is singing “Ruby Tuesday” faintly from the speaker above their heads. She rubs her mother’s arm. “I’m here and you’re safe.” She wonders if her sister’s apparent care disguises something more sinister, her mother’s supposed fear of the outsid
e world a fiction Robyn uses to keep her in the house. But her mother is becoming increasingly agitated and when the food arrives she says, “I really don’t feel very well.”
“Come on. That pasta looks fantastic. When was the last time you had a treat?”
Her mother stands up, knocking a water glass to the floor where it shatters. Carol grabs her mother’s arm but there is no way she can hang on to it without making the scene look ugly. She lets her mother go, puts thirty pounds on the table, runs for the door and finds her sitting at a bus stop, crying and saying, “Why did you bring me here? I want to go home.”
When they pull up outside the house her mother says, “I don’t want you to come inside.”
She could throw her bags into the car and go, to London, to Edinburgh, to anywhere in the world, leaving her mother to live the narrow and grubby life to which she has become addicted. But the phrase anywhere in the world gives her that queasy shiver she’s been experiencing on and off since Aysha left, the sudden conviction that everything is fake, the fear that she could step through any of these doors and find herself on some blasted heath with night coming down, the world nothing more than a load of plywood flats collapsing behind her. “I’m staying. I don’t want to leave you on your own.”
“One night.”
She lies in a sleeping bag on the blow-up mattress, orange streetlight bleeding through the cheap curtains, sirens in the distance. It is thirty years since she last slept in this room. For a brief moment those intervening years seem like nothing more than a vivid daydream of escape. She’d got into Cambridge to read Natural Sciences, driven in equal parts by a fascination with the subject and a desperation to put as much distance as possible between herself and this place. A doctorate at Imperial and a postdoc in Adelaide. Jobs in Heidelberg, Stockholm…working her way slowly up the ladder towards Full Professor. Four years max in any one country had been the rule. Out of restlessness, partly, though it was true that she ruffled feathers, and ruffled feathers were easier to live with if they were on a continent where you no longer lived.
She is not a team player, so she has been told on more than one occasion, usually by men who were quite happy to stab someone else in the back so long as the victim wasn’t a member of whatever unspoken brotherhood they all belonged to. But she has run successful groups and the grants have followed her and in the end the world doesn’t give a damn about a few cuts and bruises if it gets a firmer grip on ageing or diabetes, or a clearer picture of how one cell swallowed another and ended up flying to the moon.
Boston was her fourth position as a group leader, running a lab working on the mammalian target of rapamycin complex. Two years in, however, Paul Bachman became the institute’s new director and everything started to turn sour. He brought with him a blank cheque from Khalid bin Mahfouz and instead of supporting the existing faculty went on a global hiring spree. Enter the Golden Boys who deigned sometimes to attend faculty meetings or listen to sub-stellar visiting academics but only as a favour. Paul himself had a house in Bar Harbor and a yacht called Emmeline and a younger wife with a breathtakingly low IQ. Feeling at home wasn’t Carol’s strong suit but under the new dispensation she started to feel like a junior member of the golf club.
In other circumstances she’d have put out feelers, quietly letting colleagues elsewhere know that she had itchy feet. But she’d just met Aysha and, to her astonishment, they were sharing a house, so she knuckled down and put up with the Cinderella treatment.
Eighteen months later, out of nowhere, Aysha said she wanted to get married. Because that’s what loving someone meant, apparently, gathering your families and friends from the four corners of the globe, dressing up, making public vows, getting a signed certificate. Like you hadn’t proved it already by putting up with the subterfuge and the vilification. Carol didn’t understand. The straight world shut you out for two thousand years, the door opened a crack and you were meant to run in and curl up by the fire like grateful dogs. What was wrong with being an outsider? Why this desperate urge to belong to a world which had rejected you?
A year later she and Aysha were no longer sharing a house because…the truth was that she was still not entirely sure. It was the kind of puzzle there was no point trying to solve, the kind of puzzle you didn’t have to solve if you sloughed off all the human mess every few years, trimmed your life down to a few suitcases and headed off for a new skyline, new food, a new language.
Two months of panic and claustrophobia came to an end when Daniel Seghatchian from Berkeley threw her a lifeline, asking if she’d come over and give a chalk talk, meet the faculty, meet the postdocs. Just getting off the plane in California was a relief. Space and sunlight and opportunity. The Q&As were tough but they felt like the respectful aggression meted out to a worthy opponent and by the end of three days the position seemed pretty much in the bag.
She wonders now if the whole thing had been a trap of some kind. Is that possible? Or was it merely her blindness to the allegiances and loyalties and lines of communication upon which others built whole careers?
Her first morning back in Boston she was summoned by Paul who asked what she had against the institute. He didn’t explain how he’d heard the news so quickly. Only later did she realise that he wasn’t asking her what they could do to persuade her to stay. He was giving her enough rope to hang herself. He listened to her diatribe and if she had been a little less exhausted by three days of non-stop thinking she might have asked herself why he seemed untroubled, pleased even. He waited for her to finish then leaned back in his chair and said, “We’ll miss you, Carol.” And only walking away from his office, thinking back to this obvious lie, did she wonder what unseen wheels were turning.
Three days later she got a call from Daniel Seghatchian saying that there was a problem with funding.
“Three minutes of grovelling,” Suzanne said, sitting in her office that lunchtime. “You won’t really mean it. Everyone else will know you don’t really mean it. Paul will know you don’t really mean it. Or, shit, maybe you will mean it. Either way, you go through a little ceremony of obeisance. Kneel before the king. Ask for a pardon. He loves all that stuff.”
Why had that seemed such an impossible thing to do?
After talking to Suzanne she went to the regular meeting with her three postdocs working on the PKCa project. They were in the room that looked onto the little quadrangle with the faux-Japanese garden. Minimal concrete benches, rectangular pond, lilac and callery pear, wind roughening the surface of the water. She was finding it hard to concentrate on what was being said. She was thinking about the last walk she took on Head of the Meadow Beach in Provincetown with Aysha. She was thinking about the humpbacks out on the Stellwagen Bank. Three thousand miles a year, permanent night at forty fathoms, cruising like barrage balloons above the undersea ranges.
Suddenly the room was full of water. Shafts of sunlight hung like white needles from the surface high above her head. Darkness under her feet, darkness all around. Ivan was talking but his voice was tinny and unreal as if he were on a radio link from a long way away. “Breathe,” he was saying. “You have to breathe.” But she couldn’t breathe because if she opened her mouth the water would rush in and flood her lungs.
Finally, despite these churning thoughts she passes into shallow sleep until she comes round just after three on the tail end of a scratchy, anxious dream in which she hears someone entering the house. Unable to sleep without reassuring herself she gets out of bed and goes downstairs to find the living room empty and her mother gone. She runs into the street but it is silent and still. She puts her shoes on, checks the garden then jogs once round the estate’s central triangle calling, “Mum…? Mum…?” as if her mother is a lost dog.
A pack of hooded teenage boys cycle past, slowing to examine her, then sweeping silently onward. She comes to a halt at the junction of Eddar and Grace Roads where the taxi dropped her off forty-eight hours ago. A scatter of lights still burn in Cavendish and Franklin Towers like
the open doors in two black Advent calendars. The cherry-red wing tip of a plane flashes slowly across the dirty, starless sky. A dog is barking somewhere. Yap…yap…yap…It is a couple of degrees above freezing, not a good night for an old woman to be outside.
She returns to the house and as she puts the key into the lock she remembers her mother’s story of Jackie Bolton drowning herself in the canal. She puts the key back into her pocket and starts to run. Harrow Road, Eliza Road. A milk float buzzes and tinkles to a halt on Greener Crescent. She is flying, the surface of the world millpond-smooth while everyone sleeps. A fox trots casually out of a gateway and watches her, unfazed. Jerusalem Road. She stops on the little bridge and looks up and down the oily ribbon of stagnant water. Nothing. “Shitting shit.” She walks down the steps onto the gravelled towpath and sees her mother standing on the little strip of weeds and rubble on the far side of the canal. It is like seeing a ghost. The blankness of her mother’s stare, the black water separating them.
“Don’t move.”
She runs down the towpath to a decayed cantilever footbridge. She heaves on the blocky, counterweighted arm and it comes free of the ground, the span bumping down onto the far side of the little bottleneck in the stream. She steps gingerly across the mossy slats, squeezes round a fence of corrugated iron and kicks aside an angry swirl of barbed wire.
She comes to a halt a little way away, not wanting to wake her mother abruptly. “Mum…?”
Her mother turns and narrows her eyes. “You’ve always hated me.”
“Mum, it’s Carol.”
“I know exactly who you are.” It is a voice Carol has not heard before. “But I look at you and all I see is your father.”
Her mother is tiny and cold and she is wearing a thick skirt and a heavy jumper which would become rapidly waterlogged. How long would it take? And who would know? The thought passes through her mind and is gone.
Her mother’s glare holds firm for several seconds then her face crumples and she begins to cry. Carol takes her hand. “Let’s get you home.”