The registrar says they are keeping her in overnight. Carol leaves a message for Robyn. On the ward her mother is unconscious so she drinks a styrofoam cup of bitter coffee in the hospital café, doing the quick crossword in The Times to distract herself from something gathering at the edge of her imagination. Whales cruising in the dark, right now, just round the corner of the world. The sheer size of the ocean, crashed planes and sunken ships lost until the earth’s end. Serpentine vents where everything began. Images from a magazine article she’d read years ago of the Trieste six miles down in the Mariana Trench, steel crying under the pressure, a ton of water on every postage stamp of metal.
Robyn sits down opposite her.
“She walked out of the house in the middle of the night.”
“Sweet Jesus, Carol. You’ve only been here two days.”
She stops herself saying, “It wasn’t my fault,” because it probably is, isn’t it? She can see that now.
“You’re just like Dad. You think everyone else is an idiot.”
“She’s going to be OK.”
“Really?”
“She had a shock. She’s exhausted.”
“You can’t just decide how you want things to be, Carol. That’s not how the world works.” She sounds more exasperated than angry, as if Carol is a tiresome child. “Some people’s minds are very fragile.”
The doctor is plump and keen and seems more like a schoolboy prodigy than a medical professional. “Dr. Ahluwalia.” He shakes their hands in turn. “I will try to be quick and painless.” He takes a pencil from his pocket and asks Carol’s mother if she knows what it is.
She looks at Carol and Robyn as if she suspects the doctor of being out of his mind.
“Humour me,” says Dr. Ahluwalia.
“It’s a pencil,” says her mother.
“That is excellent.” He repockets the pencil. “I’m going to say three words. I want you to repeat them after me and to remember them.”
“OK.”
“Apple. Car. Fork.”
“Apple. Car. Fork.”
“Seven times nine?”
“My goodness, I was never any good at mental arithmetic.”
“Fair enough,” says Dr. Ahluwalia, laughing gently along with her.
Carol can see her mother warming to this man and is suddenly worried that she can’t see the trap which is being laid for her. Her mother tells the doctor the date and her address. “But you’ll have to ask my daughter for the phone number. I don’t ring myself very often.”
Dr. Ahluwalia asks her mother if she can repeat the phrase “Do as you would be done by.”
“Mrs. Doasyouwouldbedoneby.” Her mother smiles, the way she smiled in the bath. “I haven’t heard that name for a long time.” She drifts away with the memory.
“Mum…?”
Dr. Ahluwalia glances at Carol and raises an eyebrow, the mildest of rebukes.
“Mrs. Doasyouwouldbedoneby,” says her mother, “and Mrs. Bedonebyasyoudid.”
Dr. Ahluwalia asks her mother if she can make up a sentence. “About anything.”
“It’s from The Water Babies,” says her mother. “We read it at school. Ellie is very well-to-do and Tom is a chimney sweep.” She closes her eyes. “ ‘Meanwhile, do you learn your lessons, and thank God that you have plenty of cold water to wash in; and wash in it too, like a true Englishman.’ ” She is happy, the bright pupil who had pleased a favourite teacher.
“Excellent.” Dr. Ahluwalia takes a notepad from his pocket and draws a pentagon on the top sheet. He tears it off and hands it to her mother. Every page is inscribed with the words Wellbutrin—First Line Treatment of Depression. “I wonder if you could copy that shape for me.”
She seems unaware of how little resemblance her battered star bears to its original but Dr. Ahluwalia says, “Lovely,” using the same bright tone. “Now, I wonder if you can tell me those three objects whose names I asked you to remember.”
Her mother closes her eyes for a second time and says, slowly and confidently, “Fire…clock…candle…”
The empty house scares her. Carol tries reading but her eyes keep sliding off the page. She needs something trashy and moreish on the television but she can’t bring herself to sit in a room surrounded by so much crap so she starts cleaning and tidying and it is the sedative of physical work that finally comforts her. She ties the old newspapers in bundles and puts them outside the front door. She stands the mattress against a radiator in the hall to air and dry. She puts the cushion covers on a wool cycle and dusts and hoovers. She cleans the windows. She rehangs the Constable poster and puts a new bulb into the standard lamp.
She finishes her work long after midnight then goes upstairs and falls into a long blank sleep which is broken by a phone call from Robyn at ten the following morning saying that she and John will bring their mother home from hospital later in the day.
She digs her trainers from the bottom of her suitcase and puts on the rest of her running gear. She drives out to Henshall, parks by the Bellmakers Arms and runs out of the village onto the old sheep road where their father sometimes took them to fly the kite when they were little. It’s good to be outside under a big sky in clear, bright air away from that godforsaken estate, the effort and the rhythm hammering her thoughts into something small and simple. Twenty minutes later she is standing in the centre of the stone circle, just like she and Robyn did when they were girls, hoping desperately for a sign of some kind. And this time something happens. It may be nothing more than a dimming in the light, but she feels suddenly exposed and vulnerable. It’s not real, she knows that, just some trait selected thousands of years ago, the memory of being prey coded into the genome, but she runs back fast, a sense of something malign at her heels the whole way, and she doesn’t feel safe until she gets into the car and turns the radio on.
She paces the living room, a knot tightening in the base of her stomach. She dreads her mother coming home in need of constant care and Robyn saying, “You’ve made your bed, now lie in it.” She dreads her mother coming home in full possession of her senses and ordering her to leave. She dreads the car not turning up at all and afternoon turning to evening and evening turning to night. And then there is no more time to think because her mother is standing in the doorway saying, “This is not my house.”
“Don’t be silly.” Carol shows her the papier-mâché giraffe. “Look.”
“This is definitely someone else’s house.” She seems very calm for someone in such a disconcerting situation.
Robyn steps round her mother and into the room. “What did you do, Carol?”
“I cleaned and tidied.”
“This is her home, Carol. For fuck’s sake.”
“You can’t make me stay here,” says her mother.
“Mum…” Carol blocks her way. “Look at the curtains. You must remember the curtains. Look at the sideboard. Look at the picture.”
“Let me go.” Her mother pushes her aside and runs.
Robyn says, “Are you happy now?”
Carol can’t think of an answer. She’s lost confidence in the rightness of her actions and opinions. She feels seasick.
“I hope you have nightmares about this,” says Robyn, then she turns and leaves.
She drives to the off-licence and returns with a bottle of vodka and a half-litre of tonic water. She pours herself a big glass and sits in front of the television, scrolling through the channels in search of programmes from her childhood. She finds The Waltons. She finds Gunsmoke. She watches for two hours then rings Robyn.
“I don’t think I want to talk to you.”
“I’m sorry.”
“No you’re not, Carol. I don’t think you know the meaning of the word.”
It strikes her that this might be true. “Where’s Mum?”
“Back on the ward. They still had a bed, thank God.”
“And what’s going to happen to her?”
“You mean, what am I going to do now that you’ve s
mashed her life to pieces?”
Was it really possible to destroy someone’s life by giving them a bath and cleaning their house? Could a life really be held together by dirt and disorder?
“Have you been drinking?”
She can’t think of a reply. Perhaps she really is drunk. The line goes dead.
She returns to the television. Columbo, Friends. It is dark outside now and being drunk isn’t having the anaesthetic effect she hoped. She watches a documentary about the jungles of Madagascar. She sleeps and wakes and sleeps and wakes and somewhere in between the two states it becomes clear how much she loved Aysha, how much she still loves her, and how it is the strength of those feelings which terrifies her. Then she sleeps and wakes again and it is no longer clear.
She comes round with a grinding headache and sour sunlight pouring through the gap in the curtains. She rifles through the kitchen drawers and finds some antique ibuprofen and washes down two tablets with tonic water. She remembers how the cleaning and tidying of yesterday calmed her mind. So she takes a collection of planks from the broken bed in front of the house and stacks them in the centre of the lawn at the back, then breaks the rusty padlock from the shed door with a chunk of paving stone. Inside, everything is exactly as her father left it, concertinas of clay pots, jars of nails and screws, balls of twine, envelopes of seeds (Stupice early vine tomatoes, Lisse de Meaux carrots…), a fork, a spade…The lighter fuel is sitting in a little yellow can on the top shelf. She sprinkles it on the pyramid of wood and sets it alight. When it is blazing she drags the mattress outside and folds it over the flames. Through a gap in the fence a tiny woman in a pink shalwar kameez and headscarf is watching her, but when Carol catches her eye she melts away. There were twins there once, two scrawny boys with some developmental problem. Donny and Cameron, was it? Their mother worked in the Co-op.
The mattress catches. The smell is tart and chemical, the smoke thick and black. She takes the sofa cushions outside and adds them to the pyre. Then, one by one, the dining chairs. She hasn’t been this close to big unguarded flames since she was a child. She’s forgotten how thrilling it is. And out of nowhere she remembers. It was the one public-spirited thing her father did, building and watching over the estate’s bonfire in the run-up to Guy Fawkes Night. Perhaps being an outsider was a part of it. Ferrymen, rat catchers and executioners, intermediaries between here and the other place. Or perhaps her father was simply scary enough to stop the more wayward kids starting the celebrations with a can of petrol in mid-October. She remembers how he drove out to the woods behind the car plant and brought back a bag of earth from the mouth of a fox’s den then built the fire round it so that the scent would keep hedgehogs and cats and mice from making a home inside. It is a tenderness she can’t remember him ever showing to another human being.
She goes back inside the house. Someone is knocking at the front door. Then they are knocking on the front window. Shaved head, Arsenal shirt. “You’re a fucking headcase, you are. I’m calling the council.”
She burns the poster, the glass shattering in the heat. She hasn’t sweated like this in a long time. It feels good. She burns the ornaments and the knick-knacks and the bundles of newspapers. She stares into the heart of the fire as light drains slowly from the sky.
It starts to rain so she goes indoors. She rips up the carpet and the tack strips just like she’s done upstairs. She cuts the carpet into squares and throws them into the garden. The black wreckage of the bonfire steams and smokes. She sweeps and hoovers the floorboards. The TV and the curtains are the only remaining objects in the room.
She is too tired to do any more work but she is frightened of silence. She makes herself a large vodka and tonic. She sits with her back against the wall and scrolls through the channels until she finds a band of white noise in the mid-eighties. She turns the volume up so that the room is filled with grey light and white noise. She lies down and closes her eyes.
The phone is ringing. She has no idea what time it is. She lies motionless just inside the border of sleep, like a small animal in long grass waiting for the circling hawk to ride a thermal to some new pasture. The phone stops.
She dreams that she is a little girl standing in the stone circle. She dreams that she is flying over mountains. She dreams that she is looking down into a pit containing a dragon. She hears someone saying, over and over, “The fire, the clock and the candle,” but she doesn’t know what it means.
“Carol…?”
She opens her eyes and sees that dawn is coming up.
“Carol…?”
The TV screen fizzes on the far side of the room. Her hip and shoulder hurt where they were pressed against the hard, wooden floor. Why does the person calling her name not come through to the living room to find her? She gets slowly to her feet, flexing her stiff joints. She squats for a few seconds until the room stops swaying.
“Carol…?”
She thinks about slipping out the back door but it seems important that she doesn’t run away. Has she perhaps run away on a previous occasion with dire consequences? She can’t remember. Steadying herself with a hand on the wall she steps into the hall but sees only two blank rectangles of frosted daylight hanging in the gloom.
“Carol…?”
She turns. An old man is standing in the kitchen doorway. He is wearing pyjamas and there is a battered yellow tank strapped to an old-fashioned porter’s trolley at his side. He presses a mask to his face and takes a long, hissy breath. “It’s good to see you.” His voice is raspy and small. She half recognises him and this reassures her somewhat but she has no idea where she has seen him before and doesn’t want to appear foolish by asking.
He presses the mask to his face, takes a second hissy breath, drapes the rubber tube over the handle of the trolley and rolls it past her towards the front door. He stops on the mat and holds out his hand. “Come.”
She is nervous of going with this man but the thought of staying here on her own is worse. She takes his hand. He opens the door and Carol sees, not the houses on Watts Road but long grass and foliage shifting in a breeze. He takes another breath through his mask and bumps the trolley wheels over the threshold. They step into cold, clear winter light. He leads her slowly down a cinder path into a stand of trees. She can feel how weak he is and how much effort he is making not to let this show. She moves closer so that she can share more of his weight without this being obvious. He takes nine steps then stops to breathe through the mask, then eight more steps, then another breath.
They are among the trees now, dancing submarine light and coins of sun like fish around a reef. The trees are birch, mostly, bark curling off the creamy flesh like wallpaper in a long-abandoned house. She wonders what will happen when the oxygen runs out. The tank is clearly very old, the yellow paint so chipped that it has become a map of a ragged imaginary coastline.
They enter a large clearing. It is hard to see precisely how big the clearing is because it is occupied almost entirely by a great mound of logs and branches and sticks, woven like a laid winter hedge in places and in other places simply heaped up higgledy-piggledy. The whole edifice rises steeply in front of them, curving away so that it is impossible to tell whether the summit is fifty or a hundred and fifty feet high.
The man squeezes her hand and moves gingerly forward again. They enter a narrow corridor in the structure, like the tunnel leading to the burial chamber of a pyramid. He is her father, she remembers now. There is something not right about him being here but she doesn’t know what. She is tired, her head hurts and she slept badly. Perhaps that is the problem.
Her eyes become accustomed to the low light and she can make out the monumental fretwork of beams and branches which surrounds them. Here and there shafts of sunlight cut across the bark-brown gloaming. Little twigs crunch underfoot and the poorly oiled wheels of her father’s trolley squeak. There is dust in the air and the smell of fox.
Now they are standing in the central chamber, a rough half-dome of interwoven
sticks some eight or nine feet high, the tonnage above their heads supported by a central column as thick and straight as a telegraph pole.
“Carol…?”
The voice is muffled and distant. It is a woman’s voice and it is coming from outside. Only now does she realise that it was not her father who was calling her name when she woke. Was she wrong to follow him? He takes a little yellow can from his pocket, unscrews the top and pours the contents all over his pyjamas. The smell is potent and familiar but Carol can’t give it a name and there is not enough light to read the writing on the label.
“Carol…?” The voice is more urgent now.
Her father puts the can back into his pocket and lifts something from the other pocket. Only when he spins the flint does she realise what it is. The flame leaps the gap between his hand and his pyjama jacket, spreading quickly across his torso, climbing upwards over his face and digging its long violet fingers into his hair.
“Carol…? For God’s sake…”
She spins round looking for the corridor down which they came. It should be easy to spot for the latticed dome of sticks is now lit up in the jittery light but she can see no opening. Has the wood collapsed, blocking off her exit? Could such a thing happen without her hearing or feeling it?
If she were a cat or a dog or a rabbit she might be able to squirm her way out but the gaps between the branches of which the structure is made are too small for a human being. She grabs a long pole in the least dense part of the pyre and starts to pull but as she does so she feels a great shifting in the spars above. She tries doing the same thing on the opposite side of the chamber but it has the same effect. She turns back to her father. His face is alight now, flesh spitting like meat on a barbecue, lips gone, teeth snapping in the heat. The wood above his head is ablaze and the flames are running like excited children outwards and upwards through all the airways in the great wooden maze.