With one foot on the first tread, she halts to gauge the climb ahead. It rises severely and recedes, as though to the moon. I feel her grip the banister on my account. I still love her, I’d like her to know, but if she falls backwards, I die. Now we’re going mostly up. Mostly, Claude is ahead of us. We should be roped. Grip tighter, Mother! It’s an effort and no one speaks. After many minutes, many sighs and moans, we gain the second-floor landing, and the rest, the last twelve feet, though level, is also tough.
She sits on her side of the bed to remove a sandal, topples sideways with it in her hand, and falls asleep. Claude shakes her awake. Together they fumble in the bathroom, through the spilling drawers, in search of two grams each of paracetamol, a means to hold a hangover at bay.
Claude notes, ‘Tomorrow’s a busy day.’
He means today. My father is due at ten, now it’s almost six. Finally, we’re all in bed. My mother complains that the world, her world, spins when she closes her eyes. I thought Claude might be more stoical, made, as he might say, of sterner stuff. Not so. Within minutes he’s hurried next door to fall to his knees and embrace the lavatory bowl.
‘Lift the seat,’ Trudy shouts.
Silence, then it comes, in hard-won dribbles. But he’s loud. A long shout truncated, as though a football fan has been stabbed in the back mid-chant.
By seven they’re asleep. Not me. My thoughts turn with my mother’s world. My father’s rejection of me, his possible fate, my responsibility for it, then my own fate, my inability to warn or act. And my bedfellows. Too damaged to make the attempt? Or worse, to do it badly, be caught and sent down. Hence the spectral prison that’s lately haunted me. To start life in a cell, bliss unknown, boredom a fought-for privilege. And if they succeed – then it’s the Vale of Swat. I see no scheme, no plausible route to any conceivable happiness. I wish never to be born …
*
I overslept. I’m woken by a shout and a violent, arrhythmic jigging. My mother on the Wall of Death. Not so. Or not that one. This is her descending the stairs too fast, her careless hand barely trailing the banister. Here’s how it could end, the loose carpet rod or curling threadbare carpet edge, the head-first downward pitch, then my private gloom lost to eternal darkness. I’ve nothing to hold on to but hope. The shout was from my uncle. He calls out again.
‘I’ve been out for the drink. We’ve got twenty minutes. Make the coffee. I’ll do the rest.’
His dim Shoreditch plans have been ditched by my mother’s lust for speed. John Cairncross is not her fool after all. He’ll kick her out, and soon. She must act today. No time to tend her plaits. She’s given hospitality to her husband’s lover – dumped before she could dump, as they say on the afternoon agony-aunt shows. (Teenagers phone in with problems that would stump a Plato or a Kant.) Trudy’s anger is oceanic – vast and deep, it’s her medium, her selfhood. I know it in her altered blood as it washes through me, in the granular discomfort where cells are bothered and compressed, the platelets cracked and chipped. My heart is struggling with my mother’s angry blood.
We’re safely on the ground floor, among the busy morning hum of flies that cruise the hallway’s garbage. To them the untied plastic bags rise like shining residential towers with rooftop gardens. The flies go there to graze and vomit at their ease. Their general bloated laziness invokes a society of mellow recreation, communal purpose, mutual tolerance. This somnolent, non-chordate crew is at one with the world, it loves rich life in all its putrefaction. Whereas we’re a lower form, fearful and in constant discord. We’ve got the jitters, we’re going too fast.
Trudy’s trailing hand grips the newel post and we swing through a speedy U-turn. Ten steps and we’re at the head of the kitchen stairs. No handrail to guide us down. It fell off the wall, I heard, in a burst of dust and horsehair, before my time, if this is my time. Only irregular holes remain. The treads are bare pine, with slick and greasy knots, palimpsests of forgotten spills, downtrodden meat and fat, and molten butter sliding off the toast my father used to carry to the library without a plate. Again, she’s going at speed, and this could be it, the headlong launch. Hardly has the thought illuminated my fears when I sense a backwards-sliding foot, a forward lurch, an urge to flight, countered at once by a panicky tightening of the muscles in her lower back and from behind my shoulder I hear a wrenching sound of tendons stretching and testing their anchors on the bone.
‘My back,’ she growls. ‘My fucking back.’
But it’s worth her pain, for she’s steadied herself and takes the remaining steps with care. Claude, busy by the kitchen sink, pauses to make a sympathetic sound, then continues with his tasks. Time waits for no man, as he might say.
She’s at his side. ‘My head,’ she whispers.
‘And mine.’ Then he shows her. ‘I think it’s his favourite. Bananas, pineapple, apple, mint, wheat germ.’
‘Tropical Dawn?’
‘Yup. And here’s the business. Enough to fell ten ox.’
‘Oxen.’
He pours the two liquids into the blender and activates it.
When the din has ceased she says, ‘Put it in the fridge. I’ll make the coffee. Hide those paper cups. Don’t touch them without your gloves.’
We’re at the coffee machine. She’s found the filters, she’s spooning in the grains, tipping in the water. Doing well.
‘Wash some mugs,’ she calls. ‘And set them out. Get the stuff ready for the car. John’s gloves are in the outhouse. They’ll need dusting down. And there’s a plastic bag somewhere.’
‘All right, all right.’ Out of bed long before her, Claude sounds testy as she takes control. I struggle to follow their exchange.
‘My thing and the bank statement are on the table.’
‘I know.’
‘Don’t forget the receipt.’
‘I won’t.
‘Screw it up a bit.’
‘I have.’
‘With your gloves. Not his.’
‘Yes!’
‘You wore the hat in Judd Street?’
‘Of course.’
‘Put it where he’ll see it.’
‘I have.’
But he’s at the sink, rinsing crusty cups, doing as he’s told. She’s impervious to his tone and adds, ‘We should tidy this place up.’
He grunts. A hopeless notion. Good wife Trudy wants to greet her husband with a tidy kitchen.
But surely none of this can work. Elodie knows that my father is expected here. Perhaps half a dozen friends know too. London, north to east, will point a finger across the corpse. Here’s a pretty folie à deux. Could my mother, who’s never had a job, launch herself as a murderer? A tough profession, not only in the planning and execution, but in the aftermath, when the career would properly begin. Consider, I want to say to her, even before the ethics, the inconvenience: imprisonment or guilt or both, extended hours, weekends too, and all through every night, for life. No pay, no perks, no pension but remorse. She’s making a mistake.
But the lovers are locked in, as only lovers can be. Being busy about the kitchen keeps them steady. They clear from the table last night’s debris, sweep up or sweep aside food scraps on the floor, then down more painkillers with a slug of coffee. That’s all the breakfast I’m getting. They agree that around the kitchen sink there’s nothing to be done. My mother mutters instructions, or guidelines. Claude remains terse. Each time, he cuts her off. He may be having second thoughts.
‘Cheerful, OK? Like we thought through what he said last night and decided—’
‘Right.’
After minutes of silence: ‘Don’t go offering too soon. We need—’
‘I won’t.’
And again: ‘Two empty glasses to show that we’ve had some ourselves already. And the Smoothie Heaven cup—’
‘It’s done. They’re behind you.’
On his final word we’re startled by my father’s voice from the top of the kitchen stairs. Of course, he has his key. He’s in the house.
He calls down. ‘Just unloading the car. Then I’ll be with you.’
His tone is gruff, competent. Unearthly love has made him worldly.
Claude whispers, ‘What if he locks it?’