New Welsh Short Stories (18 page)

THE BARE-CHESTED ADVENTURER

Holly Müller

In the valley bottom was a large, low house lived in by one family for three generations. Its roof was moss
-
clogged and sagging, the garden fenceless, wall
-
less, trees leaning above the lawn as if searching for the softest place to fall, shedding leaves to soften it further with rotten brown mulch. If the owner had been ambitious, he could have absorbed land, needing only to reach out and take.

In the living room Seth sat with his cello between his legs but didn't play. His arm hung limply, the tip of the bow resting on the threadbare carpet. He looked out at the lawn, not seeing. His dad, Keith, slept upstairs and would stay dozing for at least another hour. Then they'd smoke a joint in the chilly kitchen and talk about whether to make banana fritters. Keith would stroke the hunched backs of the bananas in the fruit bowl, eyes half
-
closed, as if soothing them for slaughter.

‘Perhaps,' he'd say. Inhale; hiccough; exhale. The yellow skins were darkening; they might soon be lost to him.

‘We had them yesterday,' Seth would say as his dad fished for the spatula in a chockablock drawer. But it was the only thing Keith knew how to make, fussing lovingly as they sizzled on the Rayburn, the sugar and fat a glut of comfort and nourishment.

‘You'll have one though, won't you, Sethy?' He found the spatula, gave his beige
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toothed smile. ‘They're the best in the world, my fritters.'

Seth wondered if eating banana fritters was good enough reason for living.

‘Got to be done!' Keith's clap, deafening, decisive, reverberated in Seth's skull.

Seth was a virgin – he'd fumbled with a girl at a barn dance but they hadn't gone all the way. He was in love with Laura, who already had a boyfriend. She was depressed like him but showed it in different ways. She could never sleep and stripped her nails off with her teeth until there was only flesh. Her friends said Seth was obsessed, to be careful, that she shouldn't lead him on, and she knew these things were true but his adoration was important: it poured into the spaces, the parts of her that were missing, so that they were filled, just briefly.

‘Look at your nose,' he'd say, touching it with the tip of one of his long fingers, a smile of wonder parting his lips. ‘It's so small.' But his breath got stuck in his chest because being with her was like being in a room underwater and he knew it would never go right between them. He wished he could have more grit; he wondered if he should clean his clothes more often.

Keith had once been a longhaired, bare
-
chested adventurer. He'd hoped to ‘find himself' on one of those humid nights in India but instead came back to live with his parents in the family home and lost himself thoroughly; something about the place made him wholly disinclined to strike out again.

He married in 1978 and his wife, Andrea, moved in. Andrea had been to a private school where they still taught Latin and Greek. She was a fierce rider, red
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brown hair scraped into a netted bun that cut cleanly through the air. Keith was bewitched by her rosebud lips and flinty eyes. She'd been a bully in her harshly ordered school and knew how to stare at someone until they cried.

Over the next decade Keith dreamed up many madcap business ideas then lost conviction and abandoned them before they began. Seth was born and Keith's father died; Gillian, Keith's mother, remained – she was as crazy as can be.

‘I can't exist like this any more,' said Andrea one day to Keith, twisting her mouth, which was thinner now, drier; a rosebud pressed for years between the pages of an unsatisfactory book. ‘What's your future? Hmm? You sit around and imagine one day you're going to make it. But you're just imagining. You're practically imaginary, full stop. I'm sorry, but I'm finished here.' And she went to live with a driving instructor in Brighton.

Keith was dimly aware that things were not how he'd meant them to be: scrounging pot off his son and getting high when Seth was at college, powder too if there was any; once Seth had come home to find Keith curled in a ball on the living
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room floor.

‘I feel the size of a teacup,' Keith had breathed with an expression of paralysed disbelief, fingers kneading his scalp. Bored, he'd snorted a gram of something unidentifiable stashed in Seth's ‘secret' shoebox.

Seth often stayed home and wasted a day. He and Keith smoked and watched daytime TV.
Then Seth helped Keith decide what to eat for lunch and dinner and sometimes drove the car to town (though he didn't have a licence) to get provisions, including plenty of bananas, as requested by Keith.

Andrea visited occasionally. ‘Don't try and say you're not on smack,' she'd hiss at her son just before setting off back to Brighton. She'd seen Seth's death in a dream – slumped in the gutter with vomit on his face – and had woken up wet with sweat. ‘I know that look – those black eyes.'
And she'd glance bitterly at Keith, who'd used heroin for the first five years of their marriage.

Seth and Laura went out into the garden late one afternoon.

‘I'm worried about you,' she said, as they sat on the millstone beneath the trees. Seth smiled; his eyes in their shadowed sockets were sad even when he smiled, with long lashes like horses and Jersey cows. ‘You've got to get out of here. There's an atmosphere. It's sick. Whenever I walk in the door I feel it.'

‘I know,' he said. But his head hung low, elbows on knees, and Laura felt impatient and angry. He was cowardly and hopeless and part of it all.
I won't come any more
, she vowed. But she did, several times.

For a period, Seth shared the house with both his grandmothers, Gillian and Edith. Edith, Andrea's mother, moved in because Andrea couldn't bear to put her in a state
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funded home where she'd ‘sit for hours in piss
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soaked pants before some little foreign bitch nurse will bother to come and change her'. Keith didn't ask why Andrea couldn't take her mother to live with her in Brighton. Andrea ruled his heart even now, like a pitiless schoolmistress.

Gillian was unaware of Edith and Edith was mostly unaware of Gillian unless Gillian grabbed Edith's arm, twisting loose skin with a vicious bony hand, demanding her name. Edith couldn't remember her name so the conversation died there. Edith suffered from hallucinations and would ask Seth why there was a tiny Red Indian on the sill of her casement window. He once pretended to be the voice of God outside her bedroom door. He affected a deep and resonant tone.

‘Hello, Edith.'

A long pause.

‘Hello,' Edith's voice quavered.

‘I am your creator.'

‘Oh, Lord. Christ Almighty!' Edith didn't often swear. ‘What do you want me to do?'

‘Edith.' He paused to think. ‘You must be at peace and forget your troubles. And do not worry about losing your memory. I will guide you.' He wondered if this would be a comfort to her.

‘Thank you, Lord. Thank you!'

‘God bless you, my child.'

Edith stayed sitting on the edge of her bed, listening, for the rest of that day.

Gillian, on the other hand, was noxious. She swore angrily at people who visited the house, told them they looked ridiculous or accused them of being in league with Hitler.

‘You're stupid. It's obvious to me.' She would lurch from her room to the top of the stairs and hang onto the banister, her long glittery shawl brushing the stair carpet, her hair awry.
‘You,' she'd jab a finger in the direction of the shocked deliveryman or neighbour, ‘are a cunt.' A derisive laugh. ‘Hitler was a cunt. Everyone's a cunt. Cunts.' And she'd slam back into her room.

On one occasion Gillian was actually lethal. A small black cat named Tiny had sneaked into her bedroom to lie on top of the wardrobe. Gillian was getting dressed up for dinner as she often did. She'd stolen a can of Lynx from Seth's chest of drawers and sprayed it so liberally that she emptied the can and Tiny expired where she lay, undiscovered for months.

They found Gillian at the bottom of the stairs one summer day with a broken neck. Seth's first thought was of a dead bird, crumpled and light, with the shimmering shawl spread about her like wings.

‘I wonder if she jumped,' said Keith with a pensive expression.

After that, there was just Edith, until Andrea scooped her up one day and bundled her into the car.

‘She can't stay here,' she said, a blustery pre
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storm wind lifting strands of hair from her bun like the tendrils of an angry goddess. ‘She needs taking care of.
This house could kill anyone off before their time.'

She needed taking care of years ago
, thought Seth.
Where were you then?
At that moment he hated his mother, like he hated repugnant strangers on the news who trod on the weak. He watched Edith being driven away, tyres flurrying grit, her face a pale blur through the steamed
-
up window, looking back.

The house responded to the desertion by sagging further – window frames rotted, a stair crumbled while Keith was standing on it, paint hung from the walls in Edith's old bedroom like dead skin, slates fell or shattered at the slightest temperature change. Seth stopped going to college altogether and moped about the house. When he was alone he imagined he could feel things: ripples, someone near – and he heard echoes, sighs, footfalls on the floor above, his mother's laughter. Or Edith at the bottom of the garden, a grey shape detaching itself from the mist; Gillian in the chair by the hearth, becoming when he looked just a large brown cushion creased into the sharp outline of her shoulders.

Seth and Keith succumbed to a TV coma. They got drunk after dinner on apple schnapps. It took a long time for either of them to start thinking about what they should do next.

That Saturday, Seth sat with his cello and stared out at the lawn. He was thinking about Laura. He needed to stop thinking about her so much.

He blinked and focused on the room around him: cans on the floor, empty glasses containing the sticky remains of drinks, ashtrays overflowing on the fat armrests of chairs, discarded pizza boxes and chocolate wrappers, crumbs. Ornaments and pictures were ghostly with thick shrouds of dust, never admired. He put down his cello and stood, bending instead to pick up one of his juggling balls. He'd a vague memory of staggering, drunk, the night before, neck craned back, trying to catch the colourful blurs that flew ceiling
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ward and then plummeted, just out of reach. He massaged the ball in his palm, feeling the plastic beads slide inside the cotton bag. He swivelled on his foot and threw it at the wall above the fireplace. It hit with a dull smack and fell. A hiss began high in the chimneybreast, growing louder. Then a black cloud vomited into the fireplace, across the rug, and into the centre of the room. Eventually, the hissing stopped. The soot settled. The pinecones – which Seth had collected when he was five to decorate the hearth – were buried. He stepped backwards and perfect footprints of red carpet appeared. A resolution formed slowly in his mind. He went to the base of the stairs.

‘Dad!' he called.

No reply.

He bounded upwards, leaped over the broken step, burst into Keith's bedroom. ‘Dad!' He jumped on to the double bed. ‘Dad, come on, get up!' Keith was a mummified lump beneath the duvet. Seth shook him persistently until Keith pulled the cover from his face and opened one puffy eye.

‘What, for Christ's sake?'

‘Dad, you have to wake up.'

‘What, man? I'm awake.'

‘We've got to start doing things. Come downstairs. Let's have breakfast.'

‘What time is it?'

‘It's half past three.'

‘Shit. That's late.'

‘Yeah. Come on, get up.'

Seth yanked the cover away and Keith sat up.

‘Alright, alright.' He swung his legs off the bed, put on his dressing gown.

‘We're having porridge.' Seth kicked slippers towards his dad's feet.

‘Are we?'

‘Yep.'

‘Not fritters?'

‘Nope.'

Seth ran downstairs and Keith traipsed after him, obedient.

After breakfast, Seth found the old vacuum cleaner that was under the stairs and thoroughly cleaned every single room. It took him five hours. The exertion was good – it felt good to have blood throb in his temples, to make a racket, to stretch, to lean, to tear cabinets free of cobweb moorings, reclaim the grey space behind, beneath. When he'd finished, sweat sticking his fringe to his forehead, he imagined that the house reeled – violated, resentful – vengeful even. The nozzle of the vacuum had been thrust unceremoniously into every secret nook. The dust of years – flakes, fibres, hairs – had been whisked away up the flexible attachment. Fragments of his family, collected in corners and on ledges, had been brutally and noisily obliterated.