Our Picnics in the Sun (18 page)

Theo likes it when he finds a log with a slug on it; he opens the door of the stove, delivers it with a flip of the little brass shovel into the jaws of hell and with glad horror reports how it writhes in the heat, discharges its bubbling goo, and shrivels to nothing. He times it. Some evenings he runs contests, searching with the poker through the logs for a batch of slimy contestants and using the hearth brush to sweep them along and into the shovel. Then he tips them all into the flames and watches. He awards points for wriggle performance, slime leakage, and length of survival; last one to die is the winner. Some honor, I say. Several times I complain it’s cruel. I tell him I don’t want to see them suffer.

“They’re slugs. They don’t suffer,” he says.

“How do you know that?” I say.

“How can they? They haven’t got any nerves, so they haven’t got anything to suffer with. And even if they did have nerves they’ve got no brains, so they’ve got no way of
knowing
they’re suffering.”

“How do you know they haven’t got nerves, or brains?”

Theo giggles and says, “Because all they are is gloop. Ergh, did you see that one?”

I continue to object, in an offhand way. I loathe slugs. Howard would only lift them out from the vegetable garden and fling them away, but I used to slice them with the spade. Is this any different? Mostly I just smile at Theo’s childishness and don’t pretend anymore that I care. I fancy there is a new, mushroomy, almost meaty smell in the room when slug-roasting is in progress, but I keep this to myself. I’m a little ashamed that I’m not altogether disgusted by it, and that I am enjoying in the back of my mind the knowledge that Howard would be horrified, and also that he never found out what I did with the spade.

T
he water was often cold and the bristles too sharp, especially when, as happened more and more often, the shaving brush was jabbed into his face and neck rather than stroked across. The soap was greasy and astringent and made his nose and eyes prickle and run. Every one of the nicks from previous shaves, which never had time to heal, sang with pain. Howard squeezed his hands into fists inside his sleeves, and he closed his eyes and mouth tight and tried to keep still and quiet, but the smell of the soap brought on hard, stinging sneezes that he was always afraid would cause the razor to slip. Struggling against it all, he couldn’t remember why he’d cut off his beard in the first place, and every time he tried to find words to explain that he’d changed his mind and wanted his hair and beard to grow back—that he wanted, above all, to be left alone—there was even rougher zeal in the shaving and trimming, and harsher warnings about being difficult. But he wasn’t trying to be difficult.

He remembered that getting rid of the hair had had something to do with the heat, although he was no longer sure exactly what, nor how long ago that had been. But as the days wore on—he knew they were now in September—he could hardly bring to mind what heat had ever felt like. Instead he was absorbed by a new misery, quite apart from the fear and pain of the shaving sessions, because without his long thick hair and beard his head was never warm. His skull ached with cold, drafts blew down his neck. His earlobes and the tip of his nose turned numb, and then sore. Cold traveled down his limbs and trunk and seized his fingers and feet. One morning, left alone in his bedroom, he managed to reach the chest of drawers
where he thought his sweaters might be but he couldn’t open the drawer with one hand, and ended up falling. To his own surprise, the crash didn’t bring Deborah running—though he didn’t remember her saying she was going outside—and he’d managed to get himself up unaided. He hadn’t really hurt himself, so she never found out. If she’d noticed the bruising on his hip the next day, it hadn’t bothered her enough to put two and two together. He was afraid of what might have happened if she had.

The autumn days, though shorter, took longer to pass. He spent longer spells alone, he thought, stretches of time broken less often than before by some interruption from Deborah with a few words he strived to catch, some attention to his comfort such as a cup of tea. He was very sorry that he got fewer cups of tea in the course of a day than he used to; he might at least have warmed his lips and hands on them. To keep his legs from seizing up altogether, and when he knew Deborah to be out in the garden or checking the sheep on the moor, he took his walking frame and made little tours of the ground floor, pausing to rest in the cold, quiet rooms he no longer used. The front sitting room, for years kept spruce and untouched as the “Residents’ Lounge,” was now hazy with old fire smoke and had a rumpled look, like a carelessly vacated bedroom. The hearth was powdered with wood ash, chair cushions lay squashed and awry. In the hall he stopped under the broken and jagged honor guard of old antlers and shivered in the drafts blowing down the staircase. Once or twice he thought he heard someone upstairs. But the creak of a bedroom door or some small, muted cracking noise could be only the sounds of the ninety-year-old timbers of the landing over his head shifting infinitesimally with another change of season.

Most days he tried but couldn’t manage to get his frozen mouth to articulate the word
hat
in Deborah’s presence, and when he managed to pat his head to convey what he needed, the gesture was waved away and he was told there was nothing to get agitated about. One desperate time, patting his head with both hands, he was asked if he thought he was conducting along to the music on the television, and there was laughter.

Night-times were a little easier. He often looked forward all day
to getting back to bed. He was grateful now for the thick, warm pajamas Deborah made him wear; as soon as he was lying in the dark, he would curl up small and draw the bedclothes over his head until morning.

One day, he was woken by the rasp of the curtains being opened, followed by a clutching and shaking of his shoulder. He felt a smack on the back of his hand as the blankets were prized from his fingers. The covers were ripped back, creating a chill that made him draw his legs up to his chest. He tried to keep his eyes shut but as he was hauled upright felt so dizzy he had to open them again. The room was full of dark shapes, and the window and the world beyond it an empty, blinding square of brightness. It was early. Or perhaps it was late; perhaps that was the reason for the roughness and the hurry. He was led to the bathroom cubicle in the corner of the room, where his pajama trousers were yanked down and he was plonked on the lavatory. A hand pushed his cock between his legs, a voice told him to get on and do his best. As he finished urinating he felt his pajama jacket being tugged off, and he heard the fizzing of the shower. No time was being allowed, then, for the matter of his bowels, which always took longer. Next, he was pulled up, turned around, and deposited on the cold plastic shower seat while a jet of water, almost warm enough, played up and down him. He peered through the curtain of water for a glimpse of Deborah’s face, and tried to speak. But what could he have said? That he was still half-asleep, that he simply couldn’t bear this? That he craved to feel the accidental touches of her arms or her breasts when she brushed against him? That he ached to be handled kindly again? Water poured down his face and into his mouth. Squeezing his eyes shut somehow made him unable to hear as well as unable to see, but over the rushing and gurgling he heard the voice again.

“Picnic today, Howard! Aren’t we lucky? Up on the moor again. Another birthday. Another treat!”

He tried to reply.

“Yes. Twenty-eight today! Remember the twenty-eighth of September, Howard? That’s the day Adam
should
have been born.”

A flannel was slapped into his good hand and he began listlessly to rub his belly, while other hands pushed against and into him with a cold bar of soap.

“Remember the twenty-eighth? Adam was already more than four weeks old. Still in a hospital incubator. Do you remember that?”

Howard opened his mouth to cry out above the rattle of the shower, and was at once gagged with the flannel.

“Do you? Do you remember anything, Slug Brain?”

Howard spluttered, and swallowed soap. Nothing more was said. The flow of water stopped, he was pulled around by a cold towel and dried, more or less, and dressed. Then he was chivvied along in his walking frame into the kitchen. He could tell that the vague, dark disturbance that fell across one eye was the back door, ajar and swinging in the wind. Some dead leaves had blown across the threshold and a hen had wandered in and was pecking at the scraps bucket next to the pedal bin.

From nowhere, Deborah’s large body loomed in front of him. She shooed the hen outside and rubbed the sole of her sandal on the curl of shit it left behind on the floor. Howard was put at the table in front of a plate with pieces of peeled banana on it. She placed a slice of bread and butter on his plate and cut it into fingers.

“Come on, Howard, quick now,” she said. “I need you done with that before I go. I want to get on and get to Bridgecombe for the shopping and library. You’re staying here, all right? I haven’t got long and you’d only slow me down. Besides, if you went to Stroke Club you’d be too tired to enjoy the moor.”

Howard began, laboriously, to eat. Deborah, with her back to him, did not notice when, after two or three mouthfuls, his hand grew too tired to lift anything more from the plate, and dropped into his lap.

“Theo says we have to set off for the moor by eleven, because later it’s going to rain.”

She was writing a list, and arranging and rearranging the picnic basket, all the while singing under her breath and looking up from time to time to pause and gaze through the window as if the familiar
view of the yard were transforming before her eyes into something wondrous and new. She did not see that Howard was shivering in the wind that blew in through the door she had not closed after the hen.

“Like fried green tomatoes, a plate of mashed potatoes, a scoop of ice-cream on a steamin’ apple pie,”
she sang, scraping Howard’s plate into the hens’ bucket and rinsing it under the tap. She took the van keys from their hook, picked up her list, and left, with a slight wave and backward glance. Howard waited for her to go, so she would not see his head slump forward and his lips search along the tabletop for the piece of banana that had fallen from his plate as she snatched it away.