Our mother lived with us back in the house with Granny Morley. At times. Now and then. She came and went. Like Daddy. Sometimes she would bring herself to our door, sometimes she would be brought. Sometimes we saw her before she went upstairs to her room. Sometimes we did not.
When she was at home she slept. It was as if she was a thousand years old and each of her days lasted a month. She would get up, get out of bed, and leave. Then she would return weeks later as if she were coming home from work or from a day out. Then she would sleep through her night while we came and went, got up and went to school, had lunches and dinners, went to bed.
When she arrived I washed her clothes. When she left I washed her sheets.
Her clothes she placed in a bag outside the door of her bedroom. Granny Morley would send me up to get it. I would bring it down to the utility room beyond the kitchen, which was always cold and damp. The cold and the damp rose from the worn linoleum floor and I would have to sit with my feet up against the gas fire for hours afterwards to feel dry again. The cold and damp soaked through my socks to my feet and up my legs to my body and head. So did the warmth when I sat at the fire.
I would empty my mother’s washing onto the floor, loosing the drawstring of the bag, turning it upside down and shaking it out with each bottom corner clasped between a thumb and forefinger. Tops, socks, knickers, bras, a pair of jeans. A small collection, carelessly strewn. There was carelessness too in the way the garments had been kept. The socks were well-worn at the heels and at the toes bobbles had appeared. Elastic had become detached from the small pairs of knickers, cut from synthetic fabric designed to imitate lace. There were more tallies than the lace-like fabric had intended and these were frayed. Whites were grey now and greys were lilac. Blacks that had been the colour of the night sky now had the smudged, matte finish of a rubbed chalkboard.
The jeans were worn at the knees and the crotch. Mainly polyester with elastane and a small amount of true, cotton denim, the jeans had stretched and retracted many times but now they had come to follow the contours of my mother’s legs and hips.
She was thin. Always so thin. The clothes had little definition but from them I knew her body. I knew the colour of her long hair, strands of which had fallen among the laundry. I knew the smell of her skin. I knew these things much better from the clothes than I ever did from seeing her, touching her, listening to her.
With Granny Morley I would sort the washing by type and put it into the machine in separate loads with the powder and the fabric softener. I would close the door and turn the dial and press buttons that commanded the water.
Granny Morley and I drank cups of tea while my mother slept upstairs, for as long as she needed to sleep.
At the ends of her visits, the bed sheets were left outside, then she left too. Wet with sweat, wet with blood. Always twisted and pulled, the evidence of a writhing body. And the smell of her. On the sheets and in the room when I went to clean it. Bitter smoke and salted sweat, and sour spit and the sweet iron of her blood. The scents reached out to me and lingered on the tip of my tongue and at the back of my nose and throat. The memory of smells and tastes and faint anguished bleats from behind the closed door of her room.
I once asked Granny Morley why we found my mother’s blood on the white sheets. She replied that my mother bled when she was broken.
The last time she came to the house there was no more fuss than on any of the other times. She said no more to us and we said no more to her. She behaved no differently. Daddy had been away too but he came back after a phone call from Granny Morley and lay in the bed by my mother for days, holding her, whispering to her gently. I heard them from outside the door, but caught none of the details. And I think Daddy was taken by surprise more than any of us when she left. She had seemed healthier, brighter, for the few days before but then slipped off, like she always did, with no goodbyes. Daddy was startled. Me and Cathy, we expected it, and Granny Morley too, I think. But Daddy was startled. He looked for her. But Granny Morley got a phone call and when she put down the receiver she turned to us and told us that our mother would not be coming back.
Chapter Nine
Mr Price returned to our house two weeks later. This time he brought his sons. Tom and Charlie Price were both tall and slender. They had long, thin legs and narrow torsos that gave way to wide shoulders so abruptly there was clear daylight between their ribcages and upper arms. Tom was older and had dark blonde hair, cut around his ears at the front and shorter at the back. Charlie had dark hair and darker eyes that were very unlike his father’s or brother’s, and although he was strikingly handsome there were greyish semi-circles bleeding from his lower eyelids. He had a hooked nose and skin that took on the colour of the day. This day was overcast so his skin was fragmentary and pale. They all wore green wellington boots and waxed jackets.
The Price men ascended the hill in their Land Rover. Cathy and I were sat a long way behind the house amongst the outlying trees. I was whittling green ash. I had stripped the tender bark from a piece the length of my hand span and was turning it and rounding it with a squat blade. Cathy held the corpse of a mallard between her knees and was pulling fistfuls of feathers from its dappled skin. A bowl of steaming water and a pile of wet rags lay at her feet for her to dip them then dab them, hot and sopping, onto the bird’s supple pores.
We did not see or hear them knock at the front door. Mr Price went into the kitchen to speak with Daddy. Tom and Charlie came to find us. They laughed candidly at private jokes as they walked through the still-green bluebell shoots.
These boys were just so handsome. They were so much more handsome than me and Daddy, we could not even be compared. We were almost distinct breeds, adapted to different environments, clinging to opposite sides of the cliff. It was as if Daddy and I had sprouted from a clot of mud and splintered roots and they had oozed from pure minerals in crystalline sequence.
They spoke and laughed with deep voices that were not like Daddy’s. They were smoother, though muted with vocal fry. The sound resonated against the cool air like a ball bouncing on wet grass.
‘Did you shoot that bird?’ Tom asked me. He was talking about the duck that Cathy was plucking but he addressed his question to me rather than my sister.
‘No,’ I said. ‘Daddy did.’
‘Daddy?’ He seemed amused by the word.
‘Yeah,’ I said, simply. ‘But it wandt on your land he shot it.’