Authors: Polly Samson
At the Christmas tree Michael beamed as Jenna routed out a largish parcel and handed it over.
‘Ooh, wait until you see what she’s made for you,’ Michael said, rubbing his hands.
‘Shhhh.’ Jenna prodded him in the waistcoat. ‘You’ll ruin the surprise.’
Julian and Julia pushed the parcel back and forth to each other across the floor.
‘You open it.’
‘No, you.’
‘Careful! Don’t shake it!’ Jenna said. ‘Oh for goodness sake, one of you open it. Julian?’
‘What about me?’ came Mira’s voice, so they placed the parcel with its sash of green satin in front of her on the floor.
‘But remember it’s for Mummy and Daddy,’ Jenna told her as she pulled at the bow and tore off the wrapping.
Inside was a sturdy box with a lift-off lid. ‘Careful now,’ Jenna was hovering as Mira reached into the tissue paper and grasped two pottery figures, one in each hand. ‘Ooh, don’t bang them together, darling,’ Jenna said. ‘I’m rather proud of them.’
They were beautifully sculpted and painted, naked but for the merciful green fig leaves that Jenna had positioned at their groins. Julia went immediately to hug Jenna and was acknowledged with a peck. Jenna’s attention had already been claimed by Julian, who was laughing at the knobbly knees of the male figure.
Now he sits at the riverbank and they don’t want to hear about any of it. A damselfly lands on Jenna’s shoulder and she keeps still so they might admire her enamelled jewel. The sun warms their backs. Zeph settles himself a little further up the slope in guarding mode.
Jenna stands and stretches her arms above her head. She walks to the brink. ‘We should have brought towels.’ Michael and Julian exchange panicked looks.
‘She made me swim in the Serpentine on her birthday,’ says Michael, looking sorry for himself.
Julian groans. ‘Oh, hard luck. But you should have come here. I can’t believe I forgot.’
Jenna whirls around. ‘It was last week,’ she says. ‘And no one would expect you to remember. Not right now, anyway, I haven’t got my swimsuit on.’
She plonks herself back down beside them. ‘What about the time we came down here for my birthday, loads of us, and your friend Raph was swimming naked?’ she says, making Julian snort. Raph didn’t care. He was treading water and laughing up at them, calling out happy birthday to Jenna, raising his hand to salute her, tattoos rippling along the broad blades of his shoulders like wings.
Jenna giggles: ‘Sue was all for us all ripping off our clothes and joining him.’
For a moment it feels good to picture the great marshmallow mounds of Sue flying free from the bank. ‘It was the first year he came,’ Julian says. ‘After that he always wore trunks.’
‘I’m too old to sit on this hard ground,’ Michael says. ‘Let’s head home.’
‘Do you think you might see him?’ Jenna says, sticking with the subject of Raph. ‘I’d love to know how he’s getting on.’
‘Why so keen all of a sudden? You never used to be, you used to interrogate me about him.’
‘Well, of course,’ she says.
Back at Firdaws Jenna sets about grilling some chops, puts water to boil, slicing apples and onions and moving around as if she’d never left. Her chopping boards are where they should be, stacked beside the glass cupboard, her knives in their usual block by the sink. As an act of faithful reconstruction Katie couldn’t have done a better job.
Jenna brings plates and cutlery to the table, gestures for him to set them out. The pottery figures are where he left them: the man slightly turned on his side towards the lovely curve of the woman’s long waist, smooth skin the colour of brown paper, electric-blue eyes, hair as shiny as a newly hatched conker.
The fatty smell of grilling meat fills the room. Jenna waves a spatula at him, suggests he put on some music once he’s laid the table. He reaches across and picks up the clay woman. She is exquisitely proportioned, a beauty, perhaps a little more pendulous in the breasts than Julia. Her bright-blue eyes, he now sees, are quite mad.
Jenna brings the water jug to the table, starts laying out the plates herself as the chops pop and spit beneath the grill. She sees him sitting there with the figure in his hand and flies at him, making him leap to his feet.
‘OK, I’ll help!’
‘Give it here!’
She snatches the woman from his grasp.
He tries to shout ‘No!’ but the word won’t come quick enough as her arm arcs back and she hurls the pottery woman against the fridge, shattering it. Shattering her. Zeph is barking and Michael comes into the room with his telephone still to his ear, sees the pieces on the floor. ‘What the hell?’
Lights. Action. Shiny corridor, feet falling. Ding of lift, stomach sinking, another corridor shines, bedrails juddering, a head on the pillow the colour of tallow. Perspex tunnel, dark ribs flying, swallowing them like a whale. Someone’s beeper goes off, fluorescent lighting flashes by. Mira, one hand pressed to her forehead, the space-age suck and sigh of the twin doors marked PICU.
Motionless forms adrift in seas of wires and tubing, monitors blur, waves of neon, skylines, mountains, lifelines. Machines schlip schlap, voices murmur and call, a phone rings and an alarm sounds, blip blip blip. The bings and bongs of ventilators, monitors sliding into position, tick of pump, plasters and tape hold her tubes in place. Mira’s hand is limp in his. Her tiny fingers look nicotined.
One of the dials is flashing a red light and he can’t get his money in the slot. He slams it with the palm of his hand. Behind him somebody else hits the jackpot with a cascading crash of metal on metal; a kidney dish falls to the floor splashing its contents. His coin won’t budge and he’s punching the machine with his fist. The ventilator comes to a halt, sending the alarm frantic, and Mira’s eyes shoot open. He shakes her bed like a pinball machine as the nurses come running.
He wakes in a sweat. His mother is standing over him bearing a cup steaming with her cardamon coffee. ‘Drink it while it’s hot, darling.’ She perches on the edge of his bed while he reaches for his phone to check the time. His hand won’t stop trembling. ‘Shit,’ he says, inching himself up the pillows. He’s shaking his head, trying to dispel his horrible dreams, but it’s no use.
‘Oh God, I keep having the same nightmare over and over again,’ he says. Jenna hands him the cup and goes to the window.
‘Will this ever end? I can’t shake it. I keep seeing her in Intensive Care, all those tubes, her hair falling out in chunks, her scalp all yellow.’ He has to shield his eyes as she draws back the curtains.
‘Shhh . . .’
‘I worried about her waking to find her hair all gone, what a fright she’d have to see her head like a Belisha beacon . . .’
‘Julian, try not to do this.’
‘And I longed for her to wake up again, I was willing her to smile hour after hour. And then I wake up here and think of all the times when she was ill and I fobbed her off with a video.’
‘Will you please stop beating yourself up,’ his mother says, leaning across and laying her palm on his forehead. ‘You had no way of knowing what was wrong.’
‘No?’ His hands fly to his head.
‘Stop that pulling at your hair at once!’
‘You have no idea how irritable I was when she kept getting ill . . .’ Jenna tries to shush him, to smooth back his hair. ‘I used to just plonk her in front of the telly with cheese and biscuits until bedtime . . .’
‘I used to do exactly the same with you,’ she says. ‘You were practically a single parent during the week.’
‘I dosed her up with Calpol when I should’ve taken her to the doctor.’ He puts the pillow over his face, buries his fists into it.
‘Julian, we’ve been through all this a hundred times. You
did
take her to the doctor. You took her to Dr Andrews several times.’
‘And every time I let him send us away.’ Julian lowers the pillow, mimics the old doctor dismissing him, his smile one of great forbearance. ‘Yes, children get ill, they get temperatures and tummy aches.’ He crawls back beneath the covers. ‘Oh, poor little thing!’
Jenna tries pulling the pillow from his face, but he clings to it, begs her to leave him be.
‘Julian, please stop. Get up now and let’s take that poor dog for a walk.’
‘I can’t do it. I just want to sleep.’ Waves of despair suck back and forth beneath his ribs. His mother sits and rubs his ratcheting back, talks of one step at a time.
He needs to work, nothing else will save him. Jenna made him open his post. She read over his shoulder. There were final reminders from the builders and the building society, bad news from the bank. His accountant’s calculations had been optimistic when he went to him about Firdaws: in the end the sale of Cromwell Gardens covered less than half. This year his New Year’s resolution had been to work his socks off to get them out of the mess he’d got them in to.
‘I’ll drink to that.’ Julia had crashed her glass to his as Big Ben bonged and fireworks exploded on the telly. Christ, he wanted to say, I’m doing my best. They were supposed to be at a party in London. But Mira was going down with yet another bug. The party was on a houseboat at Hampton Wick with a hog roast and dancing on the deck; Freda would be there, and William. Karl was coming with his girlfriend from Amsterdam. Jenna and Michael tried to make them go, it really was no problem to care for Mira. Mira was shivering on the sofa despite the hot-water bottle at her chest and a quilt tucked all around. ‘But what about me?’ She hadn’t spoken but he could hear her just the same.
He went for the Calpol. Where better to see in the new year than here, he thought, looking at Julia sitting with Mira’s head in her lap, gently smoothing the hair from her forehead, the scent of pine and Christmas tree sparkling, apple logs crackling in the fire.
Julia took a long silent bath behind the locked door of what he thought of as the Nicholsons’ bathroom. He paused on the landing for a couple of breaths of her Christmas bath oil, grapefruit and roses, resisted the temptation to knock so that he might come in and watch her bathe. The thought of the hideously out-of-place egg-shaped bath where the bed should have been and the fake marble walls made it easier to ignore his inner Bonnard. He went to check on Mira. She lay in the centre of their bed, her mouth open, steadily snoring, one arm slung across her forehead, her temperature soothed by the magic pink liquid.
Downstairs Jenna was muttering about the turkey and ham pie drying out. Eventually Julia joined them, looking more relaxed after her bath, her skin gleaming with body lotion. She was wearing her lavender jumper and jeans, some silk irises that he’d put in her Christmas stocking pinned into her hair. Jenna gasped. ‘Beautiful! They match your pullover.’ She pointed to the flowers and Julia reached her hand to her head and laughed: ‘Oh, I used them to pin it up to stop it getting wet.’ She started unclipping them and shaking her hair free.
He took the silk flowers from her while she combed her fingers through her hair. He clipped and unclipped a clasp and it gripped the skin of his thumb like a tiny plastic jaw. The silk petals had been hand-painted by a woman in the next village: delicately coloured irises with velvety black stamens, and yellow blazing throats. He’d found them at St Gabriel’s Church Christmas Bazaar, sworn Mira to secrecy when she saw him buy them. ‘For Mummy,’ he said, putting his finger to his lips. She solemnly copied him, saying, ‘Cross my heart,’ making the motion at her chest which always gave him the shivers.
He stood behind Julia, pushing her hair aside to breathe the warm scent of her nape, the new grapefruit and rose body lotion and the deeper musk of her skin.
‘Stop mauling me.’ She jumped away from him, and he was so stricken by her glare that he dropped the irises to the floor where they stayed until Jenna picked them up and placed them high on the dresser like a fallen wreath at the feet of the ceramic man and woman.
He winces now to think of the space on the dresser, of Jenna’s fury of the night before; the woman she’d so lovingly wrought lying in smithereens on the floor. It’s shocking still, the violence of it. Today his mother looks calmer, her hand on his forehead is softened by cream.
Just for a change his head is thumping. He wishes Jenna would give up opening the curtains. He saves his last gulp of coffee for a paracetamol. He wishes she’d stop opening the windows too: the birds are turned up to unbearable, bickering and screaming. There’s a breeze and the creepers flick V-signs at him. He rootles through the drawer of his bedside table for painkillers. Vaseline, vitamins, nail clippers, scraps of paper. He pulls out a single pipe cleaner bent around itself, greyed by fluff, no sign of the rabbits he’d made to amuse her with their felt-pen faces, a whole family of pipe-cleaner bunnies, all with names. He smiles to himself as he remembers Mira doing Baby Bunny’s voice, her funny high-pitched rasp, her oddly husky chuckle, and continues rummaging for the pills. At the back of the drawer, tangled with rubber bands, he finds the packet and also a little glass canister containing half a spliff.
He holds the tube up to the light, the spliff is expertly tailored. It’s been lying there since January, forgotten since his night out with Karl in Amsterdam.
‘Are you a total idiot?’ Julia had gone on and on about the stupidity of coming through customs at Heathrow with it still in his coat pocket. He was dancing around with cheeriness, simply couldn’t keep still. A whistle-stop trip to his Dutch publishers had been a great success. Her fury only made him laugh. ‘I completely forgot I had it. Honestly. Karl and I had a smoke in the hotel and after that I didn’t think of it again.’