Authors: Jo Baker
The last time it
happened, I’d found myself standing in the canned goods aisle, holding a tin of chickpeas, my trolley already half-full of all the usual weekly stuff, Cate in the child-seat mouthing at a bit of baguette. Nothing led up to that moment, no intentions spooled out ahead of me. I just said something cheerful to Cate, and put the tin in the trolley, and pushed it on, around the end of the aisle, into the next: pasta, oils, and vinegars. I got on with the shopping. I paid, drove home, unpacked the groceries, fed Cate her lunch of avocado mush and all the time I was searching for one moment. One clear moment’s memory of before, before the chickpeas in Sainsbury’s and the doughy gummed bit of baguette, and Cate’s drooled-on fist and
perfect thoughtful clear wet eyes. I found an image of me at the kitchen table, drinking coffee, staring out of the window at the squirrels as they raided downstairs’ bird table. But it was from the outside; I could see myself sitting there, hunched over one of our blue mugs, my head turned to look out of the window, and I don’t know if it was true. But while I was filling my trolley with the usual stuff, and turning up where I needed to be, and doing the things that needed doing, and finding my way home again—so long as Cate was happy and thriving—there seemed no need to talk about it, no need for anyone to know about the dark space. The blanks I couldn’t fill in.
This time I surfaced looking at the bookcase, thinking how the wood grain seemed almost rippled, like sand where the tide has pulled away. I had no notion of what led up to that moment, or what should follow next. I was aware of the pressing need to pee, and grasping on to this sensation as if it were a rope that would haul me up, I was on my feet and heading for the bathroom, and pushing at the bathroom door.
I sat, my head in my hands, and peed for ages. I washed my hands and the soap was veined with grey. I ran a bath. The tap coughed, spluttered, poured scalding water. I tipped Mum’s Radox into the water, swirled it with a hand. There was a dead spider plant on the windowsill. The papery transparency of the leaves was beautiful. I picked one off and rolled it between my fingertips. The room filled with steam, the window veiled itself in condensation. I sat down on the edge of the bath to take off my boots. I shivered; a deep muscular shiver, my teeth gritted together. There was a trail of dried mud across the bathroom floor. I remembered the drizzle. The scramble through the woods.
Getting back. I looked down at my feet: same boots. Same jeans stuck with dry mud. Same jumper.
“Jesus.”
I’d not dealt with these basic, animal needs. I’d not noticed my own discomfort. Perched on the bath’s edge, steam rising around me, I bit at the skin beside a thumbnail, tearing away a tiny strip, leaving the flesh bright and oozing. My whole body was clenched tight with cold and fear. What was happening to me?
The bath was so hot that my nerves misfired, and for a moment the water seemed cold, almost freezing. I eased myself warily into it, onto my knees, and my skin flushed up, almost scalded. I slid my legs out from underneath me to sit, wincing at the heat, and then slowly, carefully I lay down, sweat salty on my upper lip, and it was almost painful.
My scar looked awful in the water. It flushed up bright pink, bulged at the right side, where the join is not quite right. The water cooled, and I lay on, till it was the temperature of blood. I could only feel its heat by stirring it, by bending a leg, by lifting a hand, by shifting myself higher and then sinking lower in the water. The air was colder than the water. I couldn’t bring myself to get out.
If something’s broken, you fix it. If it’s torn, you stitch it up. But you always know the mend is there, ready to tear again. You can feel its rawness.
I dressed in clean dry clothes and sat down on the bed, my back against the wall, the street window to my side. I was looking at my hands. I felt too fatigued and apathetic to do much else.
The skin was dry and cracked from housework and the weather and the bathwater and neglect. It had already thinned across the backs, tendons rising to the surface like rock through eroding soil. I pinched it; it didn’t spring, it seeped back into place. My hands have become my mother’s hands.
The stack of bags and boxes in the next room. The daffodils fading in the pewter jug downstairs. The soap by the sink worn to a sliver by cupped palms, cracked and hardened by disuse. It all needed sorting, dealing with, finishing. But first I had to claw my way back towards the beginning, to find a place to start.
I remembered that Saturday morning, in Waterstone’s. I was pushing Cate through towards the Children’s section. The woman was standing in Crime Fiction, her quarter-profile to me as I came up the central aisle. Her hair was dark and curly and salted with grey and she was slim as a hound, dressed in navy blue, a brown leather bag hanging at her hip, and she was looking down at a book, reading the blurb on the back cover. It was a moment of brilliant instinctive happiness. Mum. I wheeled the pushchair around, headed straight for her. I was going to grab her arm, shake her, scold her. Look, I was going to say, Look at your granddaughter. Look how beautiful she is. But when I touched her, and she turned and looked at me, her face was strange, birdlike, blue-eyed, nothing like Mum: it winded me. I stammered an apology, wheeled the pushchair away; I had to get out of her curious gaze, away from anyone who might have seen. At the back, near the Children’s section, I stopped the pushchair abruptly; I ducked down to kiss Cate, and told her she was my lovely girl, and we wheeled off towards the picture books and I bought her more than we could really afford.
Mum had been dead just over a year by then. She died on the fourteenth of December. In the days between her death and her funeral, I carried my belly like a medicine ball around the Christmas-rush shops, trying on coats. I didn’t have a decent one to wear to the funeral; my parka was the only thing that would fit over the bump. Nothing fitted, nothing seemed right, anything that was nearly okay was also vastly expensive. I’d come home heavy and sore, my feet and ankles swollen, and Mark would put my feet up on the sofa, and stroke them, and tell me to give up on it. People understood, no one would think twice about it, I should wear whatever felt comfortable. I’ll go in tracky bottoms then, I said, and slippers, would that make him happy? Better that than make myself ill, he said. Better that than harm the baby. I told him to fuck off. He said that my mum wouldn’t have minded what I wore anyway, and certainly wouldn’t have wanted me unhappy over it. I cried. He held me, and after a while I felt better. It worked, him doing that. He must have forgotten how easy it was.
The day before the funeral, Dad brought me the coat, still wrapped in its wardrobe polythene. Empire line, double-breasted, slate-grey wool. There’s a photograph somewhere of her wearing it; she can’t be more than twenty-four. It’s snowing; she’s laughing; shoulders up, hands raised to cup the falling flakes. Dad handed it to me and waited for me to put it on, so I put it on, and his face crumpled and I put my arms around him in the slate-grey sleeves and his face rested on the collar. It was an uneasy moment. She got it when she was pregnant with you, he said. I let go of him, and slid it off my shoulders. It was a little tight, with the extra pregnancy-flesh. I said I didn’t want to spoil it.
We drove Lucy to the crematorium, via the airport to pick up her boyfriend from the Paris flight. They’d be heading back together on the Sunday; she’d been back and forth almost every week during Mum’s final illness. We’d left too much time and got to the crematorium early. Outside, I shifted and swayed in my good boots as my heels sank into the gravel. The smell of the coat was neutral, dry cleaning and wardrobe lavender, and I felt dragged to the earth by the weight of the baby inside me. Dad arrived with Aunty Val and Uncle Peter. Val squeezed me, saying that she didn’t know what to say. I kept saying, it’s okay, it’s okay, it’s okay, my hand pressed to her back, feeling the padded nylon of her coat, the painful press of her breasts against mine. There was the smell of someone else’s burning in the air; hints of ashes catching in my throat. I saw Lucy, her face buried in Louis’s coat collar, her body slim and straight and dark against the grey of his coat. Dad’s face was bleached. Mark was standing silent nearby, his blue eyes the only colour I remember in that day. He stretched out a hand for me to grab, to pull me to him like a tired swimmer through resisting water. Then I was walking into the crematorium beside him, our hands clasped dry and cold together, the bulge of my belly making me feel grotesque and embarrassed. I was wearing Mum’s coat, unable to catch the scent of her, unable to feel anything at all. Her coffin lay at the top of the aisle, the lid screwed into place. We sat in the pew, and I felt pinned down by gravity, as if I might never get to my feet again. Dad got up to speak, his voice thin; Lucy choked on the poem she had chosen, and I just sat there, swollen and heavy, and didn’t say a word. They’d said that it was fine; no one minded if I didn’t want to speak. People understood. Later, when the coffin rolled
off into the darkness and the flames, I remember feeling an uneasy kind of relief. That we were not burning my mother’s body, but burning the sickness out of her.
Later, Dad had us share out Mum’s jewellery, me and Lucy. She lifted off the rosewood lid, and turn by turn we picked out the pieces from their cushions of pink baize. We laid them out on the counterpane: the charm bracelet that had fascinated us when we were little; the locket with a picture of her father in uniform; an embroidered bronze swimming badge that neither of us could remember winning; earrings and brooches; pendants and beads, dating from her grandmother to last Christmas. I looked up at Lucy, at her clear skin, her greyish eyes pink with tears. I can’t do this, I said, and she shook her head; me neither. We put everything back, neater than she left it. We sat on the counterpane and talked about Dad, and how Dad would cope, what we between us could do for Dad. And then Lucy went back to Paris, and Dad went back to work, and then Cate arrived, and I just got on with it.
All the time I’d been scrubbing baby bottles clean, sterilizing them, washing my hands again and again till the skin cracked; all the time I’d been boiling kettles, letting them cool, filling the bottles, counting scoops of formula, one for every fluid ounce of water, and losing count, and staring down at the powdery surface of the liquid, and pouring the formula into the sink in a rage at my own incompetence, and scrubbing the unused bottles, putting them back into the sterilizer, and starting again; all the time I’d been wearing sunglasses on cloudy days, pushing the pram around the park, the scar pressing itself against my jeans; all the time, this house had stood, gathering desiccated flies, the air drying
in the sunshine, the spider plant dying in the bathroom. The soap splitting into cracks. The lampshade gathering dust on its bones. The static growing. Waiting.
There was movement outside. The shock was almost physical. An elderly woman came out of the front door of the cottage across the street. Until that moment I hadn’t seen a soul. I wiped my cheeks with my fingers and turned to watch her.
She had a bucket in her hand. She had that old-lady stooped carefulness. She set the bucket to one side of the step, then knelt down, took a scrubbing brush from the bucket and knocked it against the side. The curve of her back to the street, she rocked back and forth as if in prayer, the flesh-coloured soles of her slippers vulnerable and tender. She dipped her brush into the bucket, tapped it, and started scrubbing again, this time with tiny circular movements, as if cleaning a large tooth, the action making her jiggle on her haunches as she worked. Then she got up stiffly, and emptied the bucket into a road drain, and the suds spilled back onto the tarmac like spat toothpaste. She was wearing a navy cardigan, a knee-length skirt. She looked up, and looked straight up at the window where I sat. She raised a hand and waved.
Not to me.
I knew it. I knew she wasn’t waving to me. There was someone else in the room. Standing just over to my right, just out of my line of sight. I could feel it in my flesh. A young woman, younger than me, needing to be noticed. If I just turned my head a fraction, she’d be there.
I glanced around.
Sun blared through the far window. The door onto the landing stood ajar, and a dim strip of space beyond. No one. I
got up from the bed. The mattress creaked, eased itself back into shape. I stood there in the sunshine, breath held. Listened. Nothing.
I moved over to the bookcase, set a hand on the upright. I had an image of myself as a child, clinging to the side of a swimming pool, children’s shouts bouncing off the surface of the water, water glittering, and Mum in up to her chest, hair in soaking ringlets, smiling encouragement, outstretched fingertips just out of reach.
The room was filled with empty, dusty sunshine. Prickling silence.
I drew a breath; I could have sworn to it: the silence shifted. As if another breath had been drawn, as if someone anticipated me and was about to speak. My body fizzed with adrenaline. I let go of the bookcase, took a step into the sunshine. I don’t quite know how, but the air seemed to change, to soften, to lose its charge. There really was nothing. I pressed my eyes with the heels of my hands, ground at them. I glanced back out of the window. The street was empty: the old woman had gone and the suds had trickled away. I had to know what she had seen. If she had seen what I had felt.
I ran down the stairs and walked straight out of the house, letting the door slam behind me. I crossed the street to the cottage. The door knocker was a curled brass fist, cold and smooth and solid in my hand. I knocked and stepped back off the doorstep. I had left footprints behind in the damp.
I heard footsteps approaching and fixed a smile on my face. The door opened. I didn’t know what I was going to say. It was stupid coming over: I should have thought it through. How could
I ask? The old woman opened the door, smiling. Then her expression faltered. She looked at me, studying my features, her brows pinching.