Authors: Polly Samson
She sniffs. ‘Doing
what
again?’ Stands, pulls her dress straight and folds the dog blanket.
‘You know what I’m talking about,’ he says over his shoulder.
Why
was she following him up the stairs?
‘I do not.’
He stops on the landing, at the door to Mira’s room, turns and spells it out: ‘Trying to seduce me, that’s what.’
‘Oh, you know me, I just want to
bonk
.’ She grins at him. ‘Jude, I’m
teasing
,’ and because she gets him laughing with that great big grin of hers, he almost reaches down and turns the handle, momentarily his bedroom and not Mira’s, such is the slip in time. He stops and presses his hands to her shoulders.
‘Then stop teasing, Katie. It’s not fair.’
She holds his stare, at first bemused and then affronted, trying to shrug him off. He rests his arm on the doorjamb above her head, attempts to keep any trace of nastiness from his voice.
‘Like at the hotel.’
‘The hotel? Oh, I was out of my mind. And I was drunk,’ she says and bats his arm out of the way.
‘Yeah, well you’re drunk now. Too drunk to drive home tonight, anyway.’ He spins her round and marches her along the corridor to the dark side of the house: ‘You can take any room you like down there.’
He flees to his own room, kicking aside piles of discarded clothing from the floor, opens the window and sticks his head out. For once the jasmine doesn’t affront him. He takes a few deep breaths and lets a breeze ruffle his hair.
Before long he hears the door open behind him.
‘All the lights are fused down that end. I can’t see a thing, but as far as I can tell there isn’t any bedding, not even pillows.’
‘I suppose you’ll have to sleep in here then,’ he says, turning reluctantly from the window. She’s beside his bed fiddling with the lamp. ‘I hope it’s not too smelly,’ he says. ‘Perhaps I’d better see if there are any clean sheets.’
‘It’s OK.’ She follows his eyes to the wreck of his unmade bed then dims the lamp and joins him at the window.
He points to his bedside table. ‘I just need my pill from there and I’ll be up to the attic,’ he says, but she’s pulling him close, whispering in his ear.
He lies back on his pillow, an arm wedged behind his head. By the window Katie manages to wiggle herself out of her bra – ‘sorry, it digs in too much’ – producing it in one long strip of green lace from the armhole of her dress. ‘Ta-dah! Oh, don’t look so worried. I’ll sleep in the rest of my clothes.’ She moulds herself to his side, tugs his arm out from behind his head and wraps it around herself. He can do nothing but stare at the ceiling. Something inside him is swelling, overflowing, filling him up. He shuts his eyes. There’s nothing but milky yearning and for a moment he can make himself believe it: falling towards him in the dip of the bed. Soft, sweet skin, limbs thrown across his chest and groin. His love, his child, folded around him like warm risen dough. He groans and Katie shushes him, runs a finger along his lips. He almost cries out their names.
‘Will you try to forgive me?’ Katie says, propping herself on one elbow.
‘For what?’
‘For Marylebone. The way I behaved in the hotel.’
He doesn’t answer. Her hair tickles his neck.
‘God’s sake, I couldn’t very well
not
see you to your room,’ he says, pulling his arm away from her and propping it back behind his head. He had wanted to see her safe.
That was all there was to it
.
‘Sshhh.’ She’s leaning over him stroking his chest, though he wishes she wouldn’t. ‘It was a terrible time for us all. There’s no need to be so hard on yourself,’ she says. ‘Just try to go to sleep and I’ll hold you in my arms.’
It had been past two in the morning when they staggered into Katie’s room on the third floor of that Marylebone hotel. The barman had left them downstairs with a bottle of whisky, the list for the builders and decorators at Firdaws was taking shape. Katie got straight to it, made a couple of calls from the foyer: the plasterer was booked and she’d found someone who knew about architectural salvage who might be able to turn up a vintage Rayburn. He felt warm towards her, of course he did.
His plans for Firdaws were folded into the zip pocket of her handbag. Instead of returning her kiss goodnight, he folded her in his arms and laid his cheek across the top of her head. She made him feel a bit calmer,
that was all
.
He stood in the bar with his hand raised in silent salute to her departing rump and felt a wave of amusement and affection as she tottered out in her too-tight dress, but really that was all. He grabbed his jacket to leave and there it was: her bag still hanging by its chain from the back of her chair. He snatched it up and ran with it to the lift, but the doors were already closing. He took the stairs two by two, was out of breath when he met her coming out on the third floor. She sashayed along the corridor, her room key dangling from one finger and a wiggle to her walk while he trotted along by her side thrusting the bag at her, trying to get her to take it and stop play-acting.
She was so drunk it took her two or three goes to get the card into the slot on the wall. Various lamps came on, dimly, around the room. He placed her bag on a table, turned to find her stumbling towards the bed. She had her back to him, hips swinging. ‘Unzip me, Jude.’ She wriggled this way and that within her stretchy dress, her waist a stem above the bulb of her boom-di-boom bum. The covers on the bed were folded back, a single chocolate in mint-green foil on her pillow. Floorboards creaked confessionally beneath a thick covering of carpet. Through the wall he heard the clank of the departing lift. His hand rose briefly, only briefly, towards the top of the zip that snaked through the valley from her nape to her tail. No sooner had his hand moved than he snatched the thought back and stepped right away from her. ‘Stop, Katie. You mustn’t do this.’
He’d already decided, even before his phone began to ring.
That was crucial.
Katie rocked back on to the bed, kicking off her shoes. ‘Lighten up, Jude,’ she said. ‘I’m nearly thirty and can manage to put myself to bed perfectly well thank you very much.’ But she had stopped existing. His phone was ringing. The screen showed it was Julia.
‘Julia, what’s up?’
‘Where the fucking hell are you?’ And her voice started to shake: ‘Mira, Mira,’ and it was hard to make out what she was trying to tell him between sobs. He heard the words ‘Intensive Care’. Katie was oblivious, back on her feet, swaying to music only she could hear, spraying herself with a cloud of perfume that made him cough.
He listens to the screeching of the little owls and the flush of the lavatory and Michael stumbling back to bed. Katie’s eyelids flicker, her bottom lip has fallen sideways. He manages to extricate his arm, inch by slow inch, and she moans softly as he levers her to Julia’s side of the bed. The way her dress has twisted around he can see the full curve of one breast hanging free of the green fabric, the faint silvery trails of stretch marks. He pulls the quilt to her shoulders, rolls over and quietly slides open his drawer and removes his pills, is thankful for a glass of stale water.
The attic-room door yawns on its hinges, a bare bulb makes a pale pool of the bed. The boards are creaky and dangerous with splinters. There’s never been much up here, never was, just the bed and a wooden table on which he sets down his tumbler, a cane-seated chair and beneath the eaves a pile of suitcases and travel bags, boxes of old toot. He sits at the table fiddling with a bowl of random knick-knacks, takes out a forgotten pipe, a brass padlock, a jade egg. The pipe was his father’s, those are his toothmarks on the stem. He sniffs at the bowl, can still detect the charcoal of its burnt edge, the tobacco so faint as to be little more than memory. He holds the egg towards the window. It is beautifully smooth, pale green with an orange glow at its centre, like an embryo in stone. ‘You can’t possibly give your mother that!’ Julia had said. They were in a funny little shop in Hay-on-Wye. He thought it the sort of egg from which a phoenix might hatch under the right conditions, if placed in a fire of cedar pencil shavings and gum arabic, for example. ‘But it’s beautiful. Look how the light makes it flame. And feel, it’s lovely and smooth in the hand.’
He remembers her laughter: ‘Don’t you know what it is?’ Him shaking his head.
‘It’s a concubine’s egg. You know? For strengthening their fannies.’
The pillow feels gritty and he remembers how cluster flies plague this attic. He tries not to dwell on the crazed slow buzz of their hibernation and the crispy rasp of their bodies. The desiccated commas of stray legs separate him from sleep. He gets up, shakes out the pillow, brushes down the sheets, slots himself back in.
Before too long he feels himself drifting, but still ugly creatures cling to the surface, battling the inevitable, ushering him along the dark, ribbed tunnel, on and on until he emerges in a blaze of fluorescence, shapes burnt into his retina, pulsing lights, the pale-green whirligig of a ventilator tube, the white gloss of bedrails, and on and on, through the shining corridors of the hospital, heart braced, bursting the seal of the doors marked PICU with a hiss.
Mira was laid high on a bed, metal rails raised all around, unconscious and naked with heart-monitor dots on her chest, so much tape holding everything in place that he couldn’t see her face. The nurse: ‘Kiss your little girl, she’ll know you’re here, even though she’s asleep.’
Julia wept into his jacket. ‘Where the hell have you been? I’ve been trying to get hold of you for hours. Feel her tummy. It’s like a drum.’ Tubes were taped to Mira’s nose and mouth, a line to her port, a bag of fluid protruded from the bed that was yellow like her skin. When he put his hand to her head strands of her fine soft hair came away in his palm. Somewhere a phone was ringing, drowning out the thin wail of a baby. There were the soft sounds of shushing and whispering and nurses’ shoes. The ward had been dimmed because it was the middle of the night and parents sat like penitents at the head of beds in haloes of light from the monitors. Each time a bin lid rattled shut they jumped out of their skins.
‘They’re keeping her unconscious. Her liver’s been poisoned,’ Julia said, and they clung to each other as a doctor arrived; not Esther Fry, but a Mr Goolden with bloodshot blue eyes that Julian searched for signs of reassurance.
In the doctors’ room Mr Goolden explained the diagnosis as they craned towards him from their seats. ‘It’s a rare reaction. Combined Vincristine and Actinomycin D is standard,’ he said, pulling three tissues from the box and handing them to Julia. ‘Your daughter’s unlucky.’
Julian found himself pivoting to his feet. He thought of Esther Fry, her curls bobbing: ‘This will be the worst day . . .’ A surge of despair made him grab Mr Goolden by the shoulders. ‘Luck?’ He wasn’t certain he hadn’t roared the word. He was amazed to see his own knuckles shining beneath his skin, white as the doctor’s coat.
‘There’s plenty we can do,’ Goolden said, gently easing him back into his chair. ‘She has every chance of pulling through.’
After the doctor left for his rounds, they found themselves once again at the hospital chapel, though Julian would soon have to go out for a smoke. Julia chose the window closest to the chapel door. She wedged Mira’s rabbit amongst the other toys on the ledge. From the stained glass above it, saintly Eunice offered her book, her golden slipper resting on an emerald footstool. The rabbit’s ears were worn from where they’d been sucked and one flopped over its eye, its head lolled to the bodice of Mira’s baby dress, her name appliquéd in red felt. Folds of white silk fell from the sill. Julia knelt and prayed. Julian thought the toys looked about as blessed with luck as tatty prizes at a fairground shooting range.
The curtainless attic is no match for the dawn, which is not at all sweet, with foul morning breath and raucous chorus. Julian sits with his feet to the bare boards, his head in his hands. The sun pokes fiery fingers at the dimpled glass, the flies already buzzing. There’s a drop of last night’s water in the tumbler. He swallows it and stretches in the only part of the room that will allow it and picks up the brass padlock from the floor. It’s heart-shaped, a little green around the lock. Bits of polish have caught in the engraving and he runs his thumbnail into the curlicues of a pair of entwined Js.
He pockets it, creeps down the attic stairs cursing each groaning board. He hears Michael’s steady snores as he passes the guest room, the sound of water in the pipes is magnified as he eyes the door to his own room, willing Katie not to wake.
He would like to gag the dog when it shoots through the back door and starts barking at a crow. He checks his pocket for tobacco and takes his coffee to the porch. He rubs the padlock to a shine as if a genie might appear, turns the key. The hinge is smoothly oiled. It was the sweetest thing. Julia and him on the Pont des Arts as they walked arm in arm to the Louvre. They were lovers. It was his birthday, his twenty-fifth. The sun was shining. A Bateau Mouche slid along the river, brightly dressed passengers waving like flowers.
In the centre of the bridge they stopped for him to open his present. She bit the corner of her lip as tissue paper fluttered to the boards.
‘Goodness!’ He was astonished to see it again, that she’d even noticed he liked it or remembered. He was turning the heart-shaped padlock over in his hands, twisting the filigree brass key, grinning and springing the catch. ‘How did you know?’