‘Oh, I’m fine thanks now, love. This is my last blast.’
She smiled. ‘Let’s hope so.’ She pulled the curtain round so there was just a small gap for us to talk through.
Down the ward, a girl emerged from behind the other curtain. She was in her late teens, dressed in a fluoro-green t-shirt and grungy jeans. We glanced at each other – I supposed I was still young enough (at a distance) to arouse her competitive streak and we sized each other up (I wished I wasn’t sitting down) before politeness stepped in and her scrutiny dissolved into an orthodontic smile. I gave her another once-up-and-down for good measure. She knew I was nobody’s mother.
‘Looks like we just made it in time,’ my dad said. On the TV, the rover was descending in its parachute.
‘There’s a storm coming in,’ I said. The gas-station guy to Sarah Connor,
Terminator.
He got the reference but not my bitterness. ‘How do you mean?’
‘Well, you can’t put that much hope in something’s direction and not expect it, sooner or later, to start to assume some sense of responsibility.’
I’d been staying at my parents’ for a week. Tyler had called and I’d ignored her. I felt a monkish need for solitude – for starvation and sleeplessness and clarity. I was writing a little at night and sometimes I came downstairs in the early hours for a glass of water and saw the kitchen tidy in the low light and felt tranquil and private and as though all was well.
‘I could socialise with robots,’ said my dad. ‘Cheap rounds, for a start.’
‘It’s the old ones I feel sorry for. Haven’t they just stopped dead?’
‘One’s still going, I think. The other one took a fall in 2009 and they haven’t heard from it since. Resting under a dune, no doubt.’
‘If you have to be buried, I suppose Mars is as good a place as any.’
Buried.
The word hurt us both, I think – death being the latest source of constant innuendo. He filled the silence. ‘It’s only a universe because of the things that don’t work. The flops. The mutations. Know what this would all be if it weren’t for all the fuck-ups?’ He swore to save me. Waved his free arm around. I shook my head. ‘A perfect line of ball bearings stretching for ever. Or maybe just nothing at all. Look, love, look – I think it’s down.’
On the TV people in blue shirts were hugging each other behind banks of desks. Messages from viewers scrolled across the bottom of the news report.
Godspeed little rover! Don’t go crunch!
I looked across the mote-bright air at the drip, eking out its poison. He saw me looking and jerked his head towards it. ‘Want a go?’
‘Wouldn’t touch the sides with me that shit, Dad.’
He looked at me. I looked at him.
‘How are you doing?’
‘How am
I
doing?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Fine.’
‘Listen, you take your time with things. There’s life in the old dog yet.’
I was staying in my old room. Remnants of me remained despite the redecorating. When I went to bed I stuck my head in the many earthy-smelling jewellery boxes on the dressing table, the velvet insides, the leather outside, like they were extinct things displayed in a private collection. There were pieces of jewellery from my teen years – silver pendants, lace chokers, precious stones and crystals from when I used to get my fortune read at the Corn Exchange. I licked the inside of one of the chokers, trying to taste my old skin smells, my old perfume. I used to wear perfume.
Hours later I awoke cold and turned to the bedside table for my phone. 4 a.m. No messages. I turned onto my back, feeling the dull click of my bones going in and out of place. Balls in sockets. Things wearing away. There was water by the bed but water wasn’t enough. I needed something with some taste. Juice or squash or something. I got up and crept downstairs so as not to wake anyone. As I crept into the kitchen I saw something outside – ectoplasmic plumes coming off a dark figure on the driveway. I jumped, thinking it was a ghost (at last! I knew it,
knew it
…) but no – as I hid there, staring, I saw that it wasn’t a ghost.
It was my dad. Outside. Smoking.
Smoking.
I hid and watched him. The party line was that he’d given up when Mel was born. Still, there he was, kicking against the tide. The big Fuck You to the big Fuck All.
I sat at the dining table the next day, planning my next move. The table had been in our family for generations. The surface was more like skin than wood. The grain had gone black in its recesses with grease, sweat, ash and old food. It breathed in the patches where the varnish had worn off. It remembered everything. A hundred thousand homeworks. A hundred thousand dinners. I felt the history coming off it as my parents buzzed around in the background, attending to the kettle and the catalogues and things that may or may not need posting. A bluebottle circled the room, lazy with imminent death, regularly bashing against the windowpane and I wondered whether to put it out of its circular misery. I’d once Googled whether insects feel pain while deciding whether to euthanise a twitching beetle on Tyler’s bathroom floor. Apparently they didn’t have a central nervous system, so it doesn’t translate to an emotion, to pain as such. They just respond to negative stimuli. They reverse. Hide. Play dead. Run like hell. In Edinburgh I lived in a student house that was riddled with cockroaches. When the man from Rentokil came I asked him how the poison worked.
It rots their stomachs.
The next day we came down to the kitchen to find hundreds of them lying along the skirting boards, the odd leg daintily flexing. They took hours to die. I’d sat in the living room, holding my stomach, rocking, hating those fucking cockroaches for what they were putting me through.
The way back to Tyler was laid out in repetitions; an executive desk toy, unplayed with. Jim had starred in nightly nightmares. I was full of forlorn foregone conclusions. Sitting at the dining table, the twilight kindling the street outside, I longed for a drink to numb my metaphysics.
I went outside to call Mel and smoke a fag. Through the kitchen window I could see sections of my parents side by side on armchairs in the lounge, his arm and her arm visible, the backs of their heads bobbing in and out of view as they chatted about something on the TV. When my phone rang in my hand I answered thinking it would be Julian calling me back to arrange a viewing on another flat. I registered the name as my finger pad hit the green bar but it was too late.
‘Laura?’
‘Jim.’
Exhalation, of a kind. ‘What’s going on? My parents are beside themselves. All this money and everything’s on hold. I know you’ve every right to ignore me but it’s been over a week now …’
‘I don’t know what to say.’
Sighing. ‘Well, we need to sort this out.’ How
romantic
. I awaited more overtures. ‘I’ll be in the Circus Tavern at 3 p.m. tomorrow.’
Through the window, deep in the lounge, I saw my mum bat my dad’s arm as she laughed despite herself. My dad shot her a sideways look. Their song was Simon and Garfunkel’s ‘America’.
‘Noted.’
I hung up and slid down the wall into a ball.
When I arrived at the smallest pub in the city he was sitting in a back corner, two balloons of white wine in front of him. Would he stand up? He would not. Would we kiss each other? We would not. Shake hands? I sat down next to him, looked at the wine and waited. He reached forward, picked up a glass and took a sip. I picked up the other glass. He looked exhausted.
Probably from shagging string players.
LAURA.
He took a second sip before lowering his glass. Fuck, it was good to see him have a drink, I can’t say it wasn’t.
‘How’s that going down?’ I said. It felt like a cavalier thing to say, inaptly breezy. But then – what? Darkest dissonance. This man I’d been making plans with, that I’d spent the past however long in love with, and I had not a single thing to say. I wondered whether it was because
there was so much, it was impossible to articulate … etc. etc
. I put my glass down on the hammered copper table and held it for a moment to check it didn’t wobble.
‘Oh, it’s disgusting,’ he said, taking another swig. He grinned but his eyes weren’t involved. And there it was, opening: the possibility of some kind of renewal. I sipped my wine, welcomed the quickening in my blood as it provided the necessary transfusion. ‘So what do you think?’
‘Would you apologise to your parents for me? For all the fuss –’
The tail-end of the sentence caught my throat as it flew up and out. I sat swallowing with pity for myself and my own tender heart in the mix – I thought I might have been enjoying his pain until that point, thought I might still just be angry. He picked up his glass. Sipped. Put the glass down again. The Spock look.
It’s life, Jim, but not as we know it.
I raised my glass again and a familiar bittersweet feeling washed over me, classic futuristic déjà-vu: reassuring on the surface and, beneath that, profoundly depressing. You’ve been here before. You’ve always been here.
‘I mean how are you feeling about
us
.’
I drank. Drank. Drank. Then I said: ‘I think it was the dream itself enchanted me.’
He wrinkled his nose. ‘I don’t know what that means.’
‘It’s Yeats.’
He shook his head. ‘What the fuck? Do you love me, Laura?’
I put down my glass. Looked at him.
‘Sometimes.’
‘I never thought I’d say it, but I missed church today.’
I took a step backwards and blew fagsmoke out too fast. My dad stuck his hands in his best-suit pockets and went on. ‘It was all over so quickly. I like a bit of decoration round the edges, a few candles and flowers, and then you need the singing to break things up. That way, you can soak it all in and really savour it.’ He leaned in. ‘It felt like a bit of a production line in that registry office. Is it symptomatic of atheism, do you think, efficiency? Is this what passes for spiritual evolution: speed?’ He pouted and released the pout. ‘God might be dead, but I tell you what, he knew how to throw a party.’
I took another drag on my fag. Blew the smoke away from my dad – even though, well, you know. ‘So what you’re saying, Dad, is you didn’t miss God today but you missed his canapés.’
‘Yes, smartarse, I missed his canapés.’ He shouted to the sky. ‘Did you hear me, you old get? I MISSED YOUR VOL-AU-VENTS.’
We laughed like laughter was the thing we were made of, like it was the only thing to do. The roof terrace of a posh hotel in a converted Victorian school. Inside: the squares of a mirrorball dappling restored oak flooring, and a fork buffet being served by over-starched emo kids. Outside: colonial wicker furniture and a hot-tub rich with the scurf and sin of premiership footballers.
February. The lace arms of my maroon dress might as well not have been there at all. I berated myself for putting my hair up instead of leaving it down for extra warmth around my neck. The heater on the roof had such a short timer that it was more irritating to keep turning it on rather than just stand there freezing.
Then.
The door of the roof terrace opened and there she was. I knew she’d been invited but hadn’t expected her to show. Another girl followed her out.
‘Hello, Tyler,’ said my dad.
She kissed him on the cheek. ‘Hey, Bill. Great news about the cancer.’
‘Thanks, yeah, few more years’ grace, eh.’
‘Ack, you’ll live for ever.’
I drank some of my drink.
‘Dunno about that,’ he said, ‘but I do have a cunning plan.’
‘Yeah?’
‘Yeah. I’m going to do what every rational person should do when they find out their days on Earth are numbered.’
‘What’s that?’
‘Move to Stoke. It’ll seem like longer.’ She laughed and then my dad looked awkward, trespassing on my awkwardness. ‘In a bit, love,’ he said to me, and went inside.
She came and hugged me and the familiar smell of her almost knocked me over. ‘This is Valerie,’ she said. The girl next to her had the same jacket and the same eyes. I donated a long, kind blink. ‘Hello, Valerie.’
We shook hands. Valerie’s hand was hot. I wondered when might be acceptable to leave your own sister’s wedding. I looked to the windows, through to the room and the party. Mel and Julian were slow-dancing in the middle of the dancefloor. I’d exiled myself to the terrace when the seventh person in a row had asked me where Jim was and I heard myself reply:
No fucking idea these days, and it’s a real weight off
.
Tyler knew better than to ask at least. Or maybe she couldn’t care less any more, either. Who knew.
I looked across the roof terrace. There was an iron staircase on the other side, leading down to the street.
On Deansgate I hailed a cab and asked for Blackley. We drove northeast, through Ancoats and the old newspaper quarter, sullen with redundancy, past the Green Quarter where
To Let
signs prickled the front lawns of artless tower blocks. I got out of the cab early and as I walked along the main road I felt the old rush coming over me – you know that feeling, you know that feeling, the wind in your ears as you stand at the crossroads, elements stirring, the clouds shifting over the moon (and every time you see that, you are mine). Something waiting for me in a small, unchanged room, in the blank screen of my laptop.
I stopped at the off licence to buy some wine. Pulled the coldest bottle from the back of the over-stocked fridge. At the till I put my hand in my pocket and felt the keys there, two rows of hard little teeth ready to bite. I stroked my nails along them as I waited for my change.
I walked another five minutes and turned into a smaller road. An ice-filled drain like a moat, a privet like a portcullis. The streetlights hitting the lids of a row of wheelie bins and bringing them up gold. I stopped outside a semi-detached Victorian house and looked to the skylight in the roof, open a crack like I’d left it.
I pulled the keys out of my pocket but before I could use them the front door opened and a woman came out, dressed for town. She nodded hello and held the door ajar. I heard the rich tut of a lighter flint before the click of the rimlock.