Authors: Rachel Seiffert
He takes Marta’s hand and she sits obediently down on the ledge, slides into the water. Her children are up ahead, she can’t go back, she has to go on. The baby grips her neck, but he is quiet now. Marta swims with the stranger to the next pillar and he smiles encouragement, swimming alongside her on his back. Ani helps her mother up onto the ledge and they rest in silence while the stranger treads water. They swim on together. When they get to the last pillar, they wave to Leka who is waiting for them on the shore.
– We’ve built a fire!
He gestures over the rise, where Betim stands, eating a
chunk of bread. The baby starts to cry again as they wade out of the water, but he is not angry any more, just cold. Ani’s lips are ringed blue and Marta can’t feel the stones under her feet. None of them can undo the knots in the baby’s blankets, even Leka’s hands are still weak with the cold. Marta turns to the stranger for help, but he is back in the water, jacket on again, swimming away, already beyond the first pillar.
Betim calls from the rise and waves, but the stranger doesn’t look round. Just swims on in silence to the eastern shore.
Winner of the International PEN/David TK Wong
short story prize 2001.
The family – the boy, his mother and father – have lived on the lane since shortly before he was born, and he knows no other home. Three now, he can talk. And walk with his mother to the shops at one end of the street, his nursery school at the other. If they go to the playground or the market, then he still gets wheeled in the pushchair. The lane makes a dog-leg turn at the far end into a cul-de-sac where the slides and swings and the weekly veg stalls are found. Not far from the flat, the parents-to-be were happy about that when they moved here, but still too far for a just-turned three-year-old’s legs to carry him there and back. He sleeps in the pushchair on the way home. Dozing lips parted, head swaying over to one side. And when his mother reaches to straighten his neck, he wakes slightly, rustle of carrier bag in his ears, blue-white, red-white plastic stripes framing the view from the corners of his half-closed eyes. Stuffed with tomatoes sweet potatoes leeks bananas and slung over the pushchair handle-bars for the rolling journey home.
His mother tells him:
– We’re very lucky.
Nursery school, shops, doctor’s surgery, library.
– Everything we need, it’s all here.
And when his father comes back from work and lifts him up to their second-storey window, the boy can just about see it all, too.
__
– Promotion!
His father stands in the hallway with flowers. Home early, very happy, he smiles and tells his boy this is really good news.
– Shall we go out? Clare? Have a meal.
His mother pulls the largest bloom from the bunch and sticks it behind her ear. Laughs.
– What do you think?
They go out all together for the first time ever and eat in the Indian across the road. The sun is setting, the street lights are lit, and the way home takes only three minutes, the boy between his parents, feet on the tarmac, arms stretched high and wide. One hand held by mother, the other by father, they swing him high over the single yellow line, the grey kerbstone, the cracks and sweet wrappers of the pavement, to their front door.
__
Perhaps they tell their son that night that they will be moving. Perhaps in the restaurant, or maybe one evening in the week which follows. Over a dinner time or bath time, or on one of those mornings when he gets up early and climbs into their bed. An unremarkable moment which passes without incident, a small part of a larger routine.
Every new job, every couple of years or so, it’s just what
they do. Eleven years together and five homes, Dog-Leg Lane by far the longest lived. The promotion is to a different branch, and has immediate effect. The other side of the city, a long train ride away and, unless they move, the boy will hardly see his father. Besides, the schools are better, there is less traffic and litter, more green space.
__
Coming home from the nursery at lunchtime, the boy’s mother decides to take her son to the top floor. Their building has six storeys. Hardly a tower block, but still she remembers the upper landing window being high enough to look out over the rooftops facing east. They went up there, she and her husband, when the council offered them the flat. It was a sunny day, clear sky and they looked good: the red roof tiles against the blue.
– It’s a surprise for you, sweetheart.
She wants to show her son, the place where they will move.
The stairwell has been cleaned in the morning. Smells of disinfectant and of lunches being cooked. She makes a game out of climbing, racing her son up each flight and letting him win. They look out on the third floor, but the view is not so different from their own, downstairs. On the fourth floor, she says:
– Look, we can see the next street from here.
– But not ours.
And her son presses his cheek to the window, trying to look down, but the angle is too steep.
On the fifth floor, the boy doesn’t want to play race-games any more, so his mother gets to the sixth floor first. She can see further than she remembered: over to the hospital chimney and mosque, along the dark brown run of the railway tracks which her husband now travels. She holds her son up at the window, points and describes. His eyes follow her fingers and lips and she enjoys the touch of his breath on her face, his weight in her arms.
– You see?
And he nods and they stand with their foreheads and fingertips pressed to the glass. It is not so blue today, the tiles not so red. But still, she thinks. It’s still a nice view.
– Pretty, don’t you think?
– No. I don’t like it.
The boy shakes his head.
His mother looks again for something nice out there to show him, but her son pushes against her arms and she has to put him down.
__
She is sad, of course, that her son didn’t like his surprise, but she knows him, and that like all children, he has his
tired days, his moods. She thinks he might be coming down with something: he doesn’t eat much dinner that evening, and then he cries in his bath.
Over breakfast the talk is of council swaps, housing associations and new nursery schools. The boy watches his parents and pushes the banana slices around on his toast. His mother says:
– Come on sweetheart. Eat your breakfast, please.
But he doesn’t, and now she is only half listening to her husband, mostly watching her son.
– Do you want some honey maybe? On your banana?
The boy shrugs and his father is watching them both now, wife and boy.
– Or peanut butter?
– Clare?
– Yes, sorry. I am listening. I just don’t think he’s well.
– I should get going anyway.
– Peanut butter.
The boy pulls his plate along the table with him, leans against his mother while she spreads peanut butter on his toast, mashes the banana into it, and then spoons honey over the top. His father has shoes and jacket on now.
– We’ll talk about it tonight then?
– Yes, promise. Tonight.
They smile, kiss goodbye, two, three times, and the boy climbs between them into his mother’s lap. Mouth full of banana honey peanut butter toast breakfast, his face and voice sticky.
– I don’t want to move house.
__
They have a morning routine. Watch Dad going to work from the second-floor window. After breakfast and before teeth-brushing, mother and son. He always stops at the dog-leg corner and waves back in their direction before he makes the turn. He can’t see them, of course, not from that distance, and the angle is all wrong. But he knows they watch him, and likes the fact that they do this, so he always does his wave, every day.
That morning, though, the boy eats his breakfast very slowly. And when his mother holds out her hand to take him into the living room, he ignores her. She stands and watches him chewing for a minute or so, then decides not to force the issue and loads the washing machine instead.
So when her husband gets to the dog-leg corner, he waves and smiles at nobody before he makes his way across the playground, down the alley to the station and then work.
__
They are on waiting lists now and get brochures in the post. New housing estates near train links, good primary schools. The boy’s mother empties the letterbox each morning when she takes her son to nursery. She doesn’t go straight home, but takes the fat envelopes to the café down the road. Her daily treat. Milky coffee and some dreams of what could be. Soon.
Biro crosses near her favourites, she takes the marked brochures home and spreads the city map out on the living-room floor. The maisonette with garden is near a school and a park. Two hospitals in the area, so she could work again. Agency nursing perhaps, and then a regular day shift, when the boy starts school.
After lunch, after his nap, she lies down on the bed by her son.
– What shall we do this afternoon?
– Swings.
She smiles.
– I’ve found a new park with swings and a pond. Do you want to see on the map?
She carries his sleep-warm body into the living room and shows him the lines which represent their street and all the other roads around it in the centre of the city. Spidery black outlines, filled in pale yellow, pink and green. She takes his hand and traces the run of the lane, guiding his finger along and round the dog-leg. And then their hands
hover together above the main arterial road into the city, and she says:
– We could even get a train to the new park today. Or a number 73. All the way. Look.
She begins the wide arc with their arms, from the lane out to the suburb where the maisonette lies, but her son shouts and snatches his hand away.
– No!
He holds his fingers in a fist close to his chest, then wedges them under his armpit.
__
– It was weird, Mark.
Her husband shaves in the evenings now, to save time in the mornings. She sits on the edge of the bath and watches him.
– Like I hurt him or something, but I was just holding his hand.
– He’ll get used to it, love. He’s three. Two weeks in the new place and he won’t even remember dog-leg lane.
– I suppose so.
– I know so. We’ll go to this place together Saturday, he’ll see the garden and the park and it will be fine.
But on Saturday the boy refuses to get dressed. And when his mother says they will take him to the new flat in his
pyjamas, he screams until he can’t catch his breath. They decide to try again after lunch, call the housing association. Only the boy makes his same shrill protest in the afternoon and on Sunday morning again.
– Next weekend then.
But the next weekend the boy is ill. Just a cold, but it drags on for over a week in which none of them sleep properly and the new brochures pile up, their envelopes unopened, the contents unread.
__
Day off work, wedding anniversary. They both take their son to the nursery and then go back to bed. Late-morning and husband and wife walk down the lane together, holding hands. She buys wine and olives, he chooses a ripe mango treat for their son. When they pick him up at midday, the other parents smile congratulations: their boy told the teacher, has made them a card.
Evening, bottle open on the kitchen table, and son asleep in bed. The parents sit up late, their talk of past and future, the kitchen light off, hall light on, lips and teeth tinged dark by the wine.
– We should maybe give it another go, what do you think?
They look again through the housing brochures, their son’s glue and tissue-paper card.
– Will you talk to him, love?
– I’ll talk to him.
And they smile at each other, at each other’s wine-stained smiles.
But their son frowns and kicks at the chair legs when his mother talks to him. Puts his hands over his ears. And when she shows him the pictures in the brochures he punches them away, neck jutting forward, hands in tight fists.
– What is wrong with you?
__
The father does well in his new job. A pay rise already, only two months in. They have more money, fewer debts, but less time to spend together. The trains are slow and if the boy’s father doesn’t make his connection, he doesn’t get home until after his son has gone to bed. He misses him.
They get up earlier to compensate: breakfast is now their family time, mother and son in pyjamas, father fully dressed. It is getting to be winter, so it is dark outside while they make their toast and tea, and it is a tired and silent meal.
Standing at the window, watching her husband walk to the corner, the boy’s mother whispers to her son:
– It would be so much nicer for Daddy. For all of us. If we lived somewhere a little closer. Don’t you think?
And the instant she says it, she feels the change in his breathing, his body tightening in her arms.
She puts him down, crouches next to him.
– What is it, love? Please tell me.
But he won’t look at her. Face set, knees locked, fingers like claws.
__
His mother doesn’t tell her husband, she makes an appointment and takes their son to the surgery.
– It’s not normal. I mean it just doesn’t feel like normal behaviour.
The doctor listens absently, watches the boy watching his mother.
– All children have times when they feel insecure.
His mother is angry, but also embarrassed. Perhaps it is nothing to be worried about after all. She calls a friend who says my god yes it’s been ages hasn’t it, and of course you can come over. So she puts her son into his pushchair after lunch and walks him through the market to the swings. But when they get past the playground he starts crying, and at the mouth of the alley his tears turn to low screams. His mother stops.
– No, please.
But the pitch goes up, and her son twists his body, straining against the straps. His small face contorted, white. His mouth red and loud. She pulls him out of the pushchair and holds him.
– Please, sweetheart. Stop.
His body is hard against hers, limbs unbending. She can feel his heart. See the mothers in the playground looking at them, the people on the market. Standing by the alleyway with her boy who won’t stop screaming in her arms.