The man on the radio was saying, ‘We’re always reminding them, myself and my wife, that we’re a gang, we’re a team, we work together, and anything we’ve got, we’ve got because we all make it happen. So say they ask for the latest DS game or whatever, we’ll say to them, well, there are some children who don’t have a DS at all, let alone the latest game, and we’ll encourage them to do something else with their time if they’re bored like play cards, we play cards with them a lot, play games, you know, remind them of the concept of the team, encourage them to make the most of what they already have. That’s not to say that they never get what they ask for, because they do, only in moderation. And we never do that thing, that terrible thing of going on about how much things cost and how hard we had to work to buy them, but we try and make sure they appreciate things. And really, as a result, birthdays and Christmases and Easter and all that are no big deal to them. It’s not this crazy extravaganza of presents and things. It’s a time when they get to see their grandparents a bit more, some quality time with the family, you know? So it’s about what we teach them, the messages we’re sending them as they grow up …’
Despite the irritating, sanctimonious, somewhat nasal voice of this anonymous parent, Melissa was making a mental note, while driving the children to soft play, of the worthier elements of his sermon – the importance of the team, the thing about not going on about how much things cost, which of course was terrible, and she was wracked with guilt and self-loathing at the thought of yesterday when she had told Ria off for putting her Hello Kitty Cool Cardz in the bath as part of an impromptu science project, stating that they had cost twenty-seven pounds. What, indeed, was twenty-seven pounds to an eight-year-old? An eight-year-old on crutches, with a hard white left leg, who was isolated from her school friends and needed to find in-house entertainment to keep her occupied. That Cool Cardz experiment had been conducted on one leg, bending over the bath, with the bad leg supported by its big toe and the crutches leaning against the wall. She had limped there, as she limped everywhere, clattering around the rooms, hopping, leaning, holding, sometimes swinging a crutch around and throwing things off the bookshelves, but how determined, how exploratory, how imaginative, how much more physical and disability-refuting than sitting on the sofa watching CBeebies. And all Melissa could do was berate her for it.
On and off for the last nine days, after an initial appearance at school where Ria received leave of absence and immediate celebrity status (‘Lord have mercy, what happened to your foot?’ and ‘Wow, let’s have a go on your crutches!’), she and Melissa had been united in their daytime occupation of 13 Paradise Row. Melissa spent as much time as she could in her office working, and the rest of the time with Ria, making lunch, making snacks, encouraging homework, ensuring adequate fresh air through occasional walks and clattering expeditions into the garden. There is only so much you can do with a leg in Paris. No running, no swimming, no scooting. All is hoppy and slowed and sedentary, and Ria spent many hours sitting at the dining table engrossed in imaginary worlds made of Lego, Peppa Pig furniture and chess pieces, muttering to herself, enjoying her freedom from fractions and this new, homely independence while Melissa longed inwardly for her to go back to school. When Blake was home with them, like today, Friday, a freezing, dreary morning in the second week of January, it was worse, and she had decided on the expedition to soft play to make things easier. It was not the obvious place to take a cripple. She couldn’t climb, she couldn’t slide, but perhaps she could sit on the edge of the ball pond and she and Blake could throw balls at each other, or she could roll around on the cushioning or fiddle with the netting, while Melissa, she hoped, could finish her column (she was late with her deadline). It had been cumbersome getting them both into the car, Blake and his straps and Ria with her crutches. There had been hardly any time for Melissa to make herself look nice, she was wearing her grey anorak with the roughly sewed-up rip in the hem, a beige jumper accentuating the thus far unflattened calamity of her postnatal stomach, and her trainers which were still muddy from the fateful walk in the woods. She had applied some lipgloss at the last minute, but this, apparently, was the only allusion left to the high-flying, world-eating woman who had once edited the fashion and lifestyle pages of Open. She had put the radio on to provide an alternative to her bad mood and the chattering in the back (‘Mummy, when my cast comes off can I go swimming with Shanita, Shaquira and Emily?’, ‘Mummy, where did you put that Brat doll that came with my shoe?’, ‘Mummy, did you know that little lies lead to big lies and big lies lead to terrible lies?’). They were passing Tesco Express. A drizzle was falling on to the windscreen. She turned the radio over to Radio 4, Woman’s Hour, Jenni Murray’s soothing, determined voice, a moment of reinforcement, a reminder. She turned up the volume.
‘Mummy, can you turn it down, please?’ Ria said.
‘I’m listening to it.’
‘But it’s too loud, and I can’t read.’
‘You’re not reading, you’re talking.’
‘Now I’m reading.’
‘Oh, now you’re reading. What about me? What about what I want? I am a person too, you know. I have desires and pastimes and hobbies, thoughts, emotions and feelings too. What am I supposed to do while you’re so desperately reading? Just sit here looking at this grey street, this grey rain, huh?’
‘Oh just forget it’.
Urged again by guilt, Melissa turned it down a tiny bit. Then Blake started to cry. She tried to calm him down by reaching back and holding his foot, which did nothing for him.
‘He’s tired,’ said Ria, smugly familiar with his not-quite-working Gina Ford routine. ‘Now, Blake, remember what we told you,’ she said. ‘You wake up in the morning and then in the daytime you can have two little sleeps and one big nap then an enormous sleep all night long, and then you wake up again in the morning and you do the same thing over and over and over and over again, OK?’
To this he cried harder, obliterating the radio. He cried all the rest of the way to Little Scamps apart from just as they got there when he unhelpfully fell asleep. There was further clattering getting Ria out of the car, the unfolding of the heavy Maclaren which Blake didn’t want to inhabit just now, so Melissa carried him with one arm, pushed the pram with the other, and the three of them proceeded awkwardly through the icy wet air into the house of hell.
The path to Little Scamps is a three-turn slope downwards into an underground dungeon composed of primary-coloured apparatus, shoe pouches, and a small café. On the first slope you brace yourself, on the second slope you sense that you are drowning, on the third you are fully submerged. You hear the shrieks, cries and wails of scamps of all sizes and ages and that is the only music. You are surrounded by netting and padding. Everything is padded, the walls of the ball pond, the runways of the fun, netted tunnels, the stairs going up to the fantastic curvy slide and the landing strip at the bottom. The scamps bounce and cling against the netting, their shoes stored in the red, yellow and blue pouches, running, leaping, climbing, whooshing. Their mothers and generally not their fathers sit nearby on hard wooden chairs with lines lengthening on their faces, cowering over their beverages or even reading material if they are very ambitious about this being a chance for me-time amid the frequent requests for crisps, juice, toilet, inter-scamp conflict resolution and alternative entertainment if they are bored. And then there is the other kind of mother, who takes a more hands-on approach, or rather feet, who has taken off her shoes, who steps, flushed and clammy of forehead, into the ball pond to help her baby enjoy the blowing machine which makes the balls hover in the air with a clever magnetic mechanism, she dangles little Jimmy or whoever it is above it and he laughs and laughs, she hopes, or else just dangles there feeling windswept and bewildered, at which she presently deposits him back on the padded floor and lets him sit, and she will also sit, with her legs tucked underneath her in minimal comfort, maybe chatting to another of these mothers who is also sitting in the ball pond, both accepting that although they are two large bodies obstructing some of the children’s passage between net tunnels, they have just as much right and purpose to be there, more in fact, because they are needed. Melissa belonged to the former of these categories.
‘How many children are you signing in?’ said the green-shirted Little Scamps warden at the desk.
‘Two.’
The girl looked Ria up and down, taking in the crutches in her armpits, and tentatively handed Melissa two wristbands. ‘Sign them in, please,’ she said, pressing the gate-release button. It swung open, bright-yellow and also netted, and submersion was complete.
The ball blower wasn’t working today. Some of the children were using it instead for something to stand on and jump off but the babies weren’t interested. It being a school day, Ria was the only one here of school age. There was no one for her to strike up a spontaneous, soon-to-be-forgotten friendship with. She would not be able to climb the nets or run through the tunnels, only play alone amidst the padding or be a medium-sized duck. Permeating the thick subterranean air was a warm smell of food additives and coffee, of cheese toasties lately consumed, evidenced by some stray crusts on the floor by one of the chair legs. Melissa made her way to a relatively deserted corner, steering the pram along a crooked path between the chairs and tables with Blake still hoisted by her free arm. Ria followed and took a seat at their table while Melissa removed Blake’s shoes. Nearby two women sat talking, another sat alone over a newspaper.
‘Mummy, can I have some crisps?’ Ria said.
‘We just got here. Go and play.’
‘But I can’t.’
‘Yes you can. Go on, take off the shoe. Wait, put some cream on first. I told you, you need to keep creaming your hands. Why are they so dry all the time?’
‘I don’t know.’
She creamed her hands and took off the one proper shoe. The other was a huge felt flip-flop designed for legs in plaster. Melissa put the three shoes in the pouches and Blake in the ball pond, asking Ria to keep him entertained. She watched her for a while, she was lovely in her limping, in her flared blue skirt, her one actual thin leg sticking out of it. She and Blake threw balls at each other, laughing, while Melissa ventured tentatively back to her corner and took out her laptop. It was difficult to concentrate, trying to keep one watchful eye at the same time, but she managed to write a sentence. Soon, though, there was an approach of UGG boots, a powder-blue coat, a large four-wheeler. ‘Hi, Melissa!’ a voice said. It was Donna, a motherland acquaintance, also frequently run into at the local playgrounds and in the aisles of Japan. She motioned to take a seat, but Melissa was not quite smiling, her fingers shadowing the keyboard.
‘Oh, sorry!’ Donna paused with her vehicle. ‘Am I disturbing you?’
‘No, no … it’s OK, sit down …’
Donna wore blue glasses the same colour as her coat. The eyes behind them seemed always staring and blank, through her light, foody chatter, about mousse preferences, good cakes, the difference in quality, for example, between a low-fat Marks & Spencer’s blueberry muffin and a Sainsbury’s low-fat blueberry muffin. There was no one who could beat Marks & Spencer’s for their low-fat muffins.
‘I’m more of a savoury person,’ Melissa said. ‘Give me a packet of crisps over a doughnut any day.’ The more they talked the more the world receded, they were sinking, the dungeon was going down deeper, and deeper. Around them the voices of the scamps whipped through the air, beneath the ugly neon lights, beneath the ground itself, and among these shouts came a sharp, distinctive cry belonging only to Blake. He was lying on his front on the padding, crying. Ria was limping back over to the table with only one crutch.
‘Mummy, Blake’s stuck in the balls.’
‘Where’s your other crutch?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘What do you mean you don’t know?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Well, where did you leave it?’
‘I don’t know.’
Melissa collected Blake and went to look for the other crutch, which she found lying under a table. Blake didn’t want to play in the pond any more He wanted to go inside the tunnels, to rise into the upper echelons of the netting like the bigger kids, but the only way he could do this would be for his mother to aid and accompany him, and thus take off her shoes. Intent on his wish, he lunged towards one of the padded mounts leading to the first level.
‘Blake, come here. Blake, you can’t go up there,’ Melissa said.
He arrived at the mount and pulled himself up to standing, attempted to mount it, cried when he couldn’t, and looked around for his mum. She was now on all fours. Donna was watching with her staring eyes. Melissa entered the tunnel, keeping her shoed feet outside, trying to coax him away. ‘Sweetheart, you’re too small. Come here, come out.’
Then he was wailing, mouth wide open, full volume, throat visible. At some point in the parenting war between what you know you should do and what you do not want to do, there is capitulation. You must let go of yourself, perhaps only for a little while, though these many little whiles may gradually build into larger and larger whiles, joining together like cells and building another person, until you are no longer quite yourself. There was her son, her crying little crawling son, who only wanted to rise, and how could she deny him this, when she had already denied her crippled daughter the full enjoyment of a wet Hello Kitty science experiment? When you try to be selfish in a situation that requires selflessness, there is unhappiness. There was only one thing to do.
‘OK, Blake,’ she said. ‘OK.’
She sat down on the bright-red padded ground. They would climb together. They would rise. She untied her muddy laces, took off her trainers, and placed them in the pouch next to the others.
After lunch the mouse man came back to Paradise, which looked more and more now like a live, menacing structure with its white and stony face and those two window eyes looking out, holding in. Dust was swirling in the air. The crooked floors were getting crookeder. The narrow hall was getting narrower. During lunch Ria refused to eat her fish fingers. ‘Don’t cut them,’ she ordered, so Melissa cut them, out of spite. ‘Mummy, if you do that again you’ll make me angry, OK?’ and she left them on her plate, also out of spite. Melissa considered what to do about this affront – should she force them down her throat, punish her, over a fish finger? ‘Motherhood is an obliteration of the self,’ she said. ‘What?’ Ria said. ‘Pardon, not what.’ ‘Pardon. What?’ ‘Motherhood is —’ Then came that tight, British knock at the door. She recognised it. Rentokil. The same anorak and hat, the same Hitler moustache.
‘So,’ he said, striding into the kitchen with his clipboard. This was his third and final visit. Ria stared at him from the table with her scaly hands. ‘Any other sightings? Any bait bites? Droppings?’
‘Bait bites?’ Ria said. ‘What’s bait bites?’
Blake was careening out of his high chair in such a way that it looked like it was about to tip over so Melissa got him out of it. He shoved some mashed potato into her ear, found this hilarious, and tried to do it again. Meanwhile she provided a mouse update, no more sightings, no droppings.
‘I didn’t check the bait, though.’
‘Ah,’ he said loudly, bending down by the kickboards. ‘This one’s been eaten into, look.’
There were sinister bites in the blue poison, which meant that something was dying, here in these walls, or was already dead. The corpse could be anywhere. ‘Do you know when? When it was eaten, I mean. How long it takes for them to die?’
‘Oh, who knows, who knows?’ the Rentokil man said, apparently satisfied at the opportunity presented by the question. ‘It depends on the size and the constitution of the little fella. Whether it managed to make it outside before the poison began to take effect. Inside deaths definitely take longer. The cold speeds things up a bit, you see … But I would say,’ he rubbed his chin, ‘judging on the size of the bites here, that it’s a smallish mouse. The smaller they are the quicker they go and the less likely they are to get outside. They don’t want to go outside, that’s the thing, especially when they’re expiring. They want to stay here in the warm chamber.’
Melissa laughed. The warm chamber! So much information, so much specificity. The Rentokil man didn’t think it was funny. He looked at her, mystified, his eyes glinting with empathy for the soul of the lost one who had bitten. And suddenly Melissa thought of Brigitte. Brigitte had wanted to leave this house. That was why she’d lied about the mice, why she’d tried to keep Lily hidden away in her room. The house was poisoned. There was something wrong with it. Brigitte had wanted to get out of here and she hadn’t wanted to let anything stand in her way.
‘Actually, is there anything else?’ she asked the Rentokil man. ‘I’m kind of busy, so …’
Onions. Garlic by the front door. What else had her mother said?
‘I just need to print off your invoice,’ he said, sitting down opposite Ria and getting out his nifty machine again.
‘Don’t worry about the invoice. Post it to me.’
She practically threw him out. He started to say something more about the mice, something conclusive, a rounding off, handing over to her the baton of kindly extermination, but she had no ears left for it. He scuttled away, letting the gate slam after him. It was January in Lewisham, and she was still in Lewisham, in the London borough of.
Lidl was cheaper. How ingenious that Dieter Schwarz who had made it possible to buy granola for a quarter of the price you could get it for in Japan. How much cheaper their chicken, their kitchen towel, their fruit juice and their vegetables, all of adequate quality if you stayed away from the lowliest brands. It was half factory, half shop. Why go to the trouble of taking hundreds of items out of their distribution packaging and putting them on a shelf, when you can keep them in the packaging and put that on the shelf one time, and people can just take it out themselves? And is there really such a great inconvenience in buying four tins of Heinz baked beans instead of one or two, or a pack of four kitchen towels rather than a pack of two? There is a quiet delight in the hearts of people who shop in Lidl, and with it a mild camaraderie. They have been changed. They buy in bulk and have discovered new names, new tastes, such as honey-flavoured walnuts from Denmark. Those freezers full of meat and pizzas and ice cream and seasoned rice they feel almost affectionate towards, as if they were their own freezers, so little do things cost. There is no unnecessary music, no ‘Lidl Radio’. It is just bare, barren, basic silence. And what does it matter that there is hardly any room at the tills next to the cashier’s elbow to pack your goods, or that you have to queue for longer than you would in Japan because there are only two cashiers, who, incidentally, are underpaid and the women penalised for becoming pregnant and denied the right to join unions, when you can walk away with a receipt for only eighteen pounds and forty-seven pence for a week’s sustenance for a family of four? You could even buy a tent at the same time if you wanted to. Lidl was a miracle.
Michael had received a grocery text (without kiss, as now standard) from Melissa in the afternoon and was walking through the aisles looking for things, the things that she had asked for and other things he might come across – at the moment he was studying a large packet of tikka-flavoured crisps. He found Lidl comforting. It was a poor man’s shop, an arcade for the working class. There was no pretence, everyone was on the same level, all united in their recession-inspired economising. Also browsing was a dark-skinned man in long white Islamic dress and hat pushing a trolley full to the brim, with an engrossed, good-natured look on his face. They came across each other again by the soya milk, where Michael was trying to decide whether or not he should get the unsweetened one. The man pointed at it saying, ‘It’s good, that one’s very, very good’, and although Michael was in his way for a second, there was no impatience, no trolley rage, which is rare in Lidl. They both just carried on about their shopping with a faint and fleeting brotherly connection. It was pleasant. It was soothing.
On this particular cold and drizzly Friday night, Lidl was also a place to hide. He did not want to go home. Friday nights, traditionally assigned to partying and relief and enjoyment, were becoming increasingly depressing. He did not want to go home at the end of yet another week to the woman standing at the sink with the different mouth, to feel the wide emptiness that gripped the house after the children were in bed, he so wanting, of something, some loving heat, and Melissa wanting something too, but not him, something else, somewhere else. He did not want to live this way, and in addition to this, he was burdened with guilt about the thing with Rachel. They had seen each other a couple more times since that first time, once in her flat, again in the vicinity of the sink, the other time at a hotel, because of the sink, when he had gone as far as to book a room for the evening and lie to Melissa about where he was. Both times she had given him that heat, that fast enclosure that he needed, her soft and open body, and he felt that her heart was truly kind, but for him the quenching was purely physical. Afterwards he was left with a profound sense of spiritual shrinking, a self-loathing that walked with him everywhere he went, and when he looked into the children’s faces the love in their eyes was hurtful, the power of it, it could not wash him clean any more. It was easier, in fact, to look at Melissa, even though it was she he felt he had most wronged, because in Melissa’s eyes there was no love to receive and he could meet her in her blankness, her withholding of what she, and he, might feel.
He had never been with a white woman before, not to a hundred per cent. It was minimal, physically, the difference between them, his brown against her cream. The real difference was in her life, in her history. She could never know him completely because she had not lived as he had lived. She did not belong to the brown world in which he had learned his fear, his fury and his distrust. He found himself explaining things to her and not liking that he had to explain, whereas with Melissa, or with Gillian, all the others before, they already knew those things and he didn’t have to tell them anything. Even if they had not felt it themselves, they knew it, because they were of the same texture, or a variation of that texture. The difference between him and Rachel was inside, in the lenses behind their eyes, in the prisms of their minds, as defined by the outer side. And when he walked with her, the tension he felt, besides the obvious worry of being a cheat, was not what people might think, of him, of them, as a possible couple, but that she did not know what he saw when he walked, the necessity and the laughter and the sadness of the blackness around him – the beauty of three black boys singing in the street yesterday, or the menace in a St George’s flag hanging from a deep-southern balcony, and in that same deep south the never-ending sorrow for Stephen, for all the Stephens and the murdered ancestors of Stephen. Or the sweetness of that moment at the soya milk just now, that passing brotherliness. She would not smile. She would not know, as Melissa knew. Her life was a different language.
Michael admitted to himself now, in the safety and the glaring lights of Lidl, that Rachel could not give him anything, no matter what she gave. Nothing lasting, nothing enough. Rachel was just a way of missing Melissa. Rachel was a way of needing Melissa. Melissa was the hizzle, she still was the real hizzle, while Rachel, anybody else, was lesser, and in realising this he understood that he had betrayed her, his empress, his mermaid, pointlessly, because he had known it all along. All that he was left with now was this need for her, physical, and in his soul, in his mind, he wanted all of her, he still did, and he wanted her to need him too, the way she had in the beginning. But the only way to make this even remotely possible, to return to a place where it was good, was to tell her about Rachel. The knowledge of this was like a strike coming out at him from the granola shelf, because it was only Melissa who ate the granola and he was thinking very hard about which granola to buy, the orange and cranberry or the coconut and tropical fruit. You have to tell her, the granola said, and you have to do it now, tonight, so that you can begin again with the truth firmly intact, with a perfect honesty. Truth is the only foundation for broken things, as earth is the only foundation for the rebuilding of a house. Go home. Go home to your house and tell your woman what you have done, and whatever happens, however she responds, take it as it is, be prepared for anything. Let avalanching stones fall down on your shoulders. Let lava flow. It’s the least you can do. And it was the coconut and tropical fruit granola specifically, he felt, that was telling him this, so he put it in his basket and went immediately to the unspacious till.
Down the high street into the belly of Bell Green he went, light rain falling on his forehead, the smell of the long winter in the air, the sound of the early weekend sirens. The tower blocks surrounding the green next to the library were lit up in their windows, along with the estate at the top of Paradise and the thin houses along the sloping bend. Mrs Jackson was out again. He took her home again and she stared up into his face the way she always did. ‘You look just like me son Vincent.’ He waited a while to make sure she stayed inside, though really he was stalling. Outside number thirteen he paused at the door, frightened.
The first thing he noticed going in was that there was some garlic hanging up by the front door, on one of the coat hooks. He heard the sound of bathwater. Melissa came walking through with Blake wrapped in a towel, she gave him a sharp snap of a smile and said, ‘I’m going to put him down, he’s tired.’ ‘I’ll do it,’ Michael said. He hadn’t seen him since dawn. How had he grown through the hours? What new expressions on his face? You could miss so much. You could miss so many small moments of a whole boy turning into a whole man. He took him upstairs and dressed him for bed. He read him The Little Red Hen and laid him down in the second room. He watched him as he fell asleep, the diminishing of blinks, the extraordinary youth of him, his innocent face, untravelled by circles, lines and time, and he had the reassuring sensation that this was the only thing that mattered, the preservation of this small but crucial kingdom. Before going back downstairs he got out of his work clothes and put the world away so that he could concentrate fully on the task at hand. While he was doing this he noticed half an onion lying on the windowsill next to his wardrobe. He picked it up, confused. The granola was still whispering to him, Now, you have to tell her now.
‘There’s something wrong with this house, Michael,’ Melissa said when he came into the dining area. She was picking up place mats, wiping them and putting them in a pile. Each time she added one to the pile she pressed it down hard, as if it could walk away. ‘I know it. Don’t ask me why, I just know.’
‘Why is there half an onion in the bedroom? I found it on the windowsill. It smells.’
‘Did you move it? Put it back where it was, I put it there on purpose!’
‘Why? And what’s with the garlic, what’s going on?’
‘My mum said it would help.’
‘With what?’
She looked at him doubtfully. He wasn’t going to understand. When she’d mentioned the night thing to him he’d been dismissive, saying ghosts didn’t exist, even though she’d tried to explain to him that it wasn’t a ghost as such, it was an energy, a pressure, a dark touch in the air.
‘Have you noticed Ria’s hands lately?’ she said. ‘They’re really dry, like sandpaper. I keep reminding her to put shea butter on them but it doesn’t seem to be making any difference. They’re – dusty. Like this house. Can’t you see the dust? It’s everywhere. And there’s this white gunk on my flip-flops? I think we should move.’
She waited for him to speak, some encouraging response, which must not include the word cool.
‘I think you’re overthinking it,’ he said, slowly putting the onion away from him on the table.
‘I knew you’d say something like that.’
The avenue of communication was clamping down. How would he find the channel for his crummy revelation? He must tread carefully and not let her think he thought that she was mad. He must obey the granola. It might not speak to him again with the same force and then they would be lost for ever.
‘It’s an old house,’ he shrugged. ‘Old houses have excess dust, I guess.’
‘Which gets into a child’s hands, and dries them out?’
‘What’s the dust got to do with Ria’s hands? It’s probably just eczema or something, man, just take her to the doctor.’
‘I take her to the doctor?’ Melissa said waving a place mat for emphasis. ‘Not you take her to the doctor? Why am I always the one to take them to the doctor, the dungeons, the Baby Beat, the fields in the middle of the day, the hospital, to Little Scamps?’
‘Oh, Jesus, not this again. I’m at work. It’s not like I’m —’
‘Yes all right, all right, I know. It’s the Unsolvable Problem, isn’t it? But anyway, I’m digressing. Did I ever tell you about Lily?’
Michael held back his anger, obstructed as it was by this question. He didn’t know what she was talking about. She wasn’t fully present to be angry with. He sighed. ‘Lily who?’
‘The girl who was here when I came to see this place that second time. Brigitte’s daughter. She had a limp. Well, she had strange hands. I remember them. They were very white, dry-looking, almost powdery. Maybe …’
‘What?’
‘Maybe there’s something here that … She was off-key, that girl. There was something wicked about her. It was like she wasn’t, I don’t know, like she wasn’t a real person, in a way? Or she was possessed or something? I can’t explain it …’ Here she trailed off, because Michael was looking at her in an erasing way so that the strength of every word faded once it had entered the area of his auditory range.
‘I’m listening,’ he said.
‘No you’re not.’
‘Yes I am. You think that girl Lily’s got something to do with the dust and Ria’s rash, and that —’
‘It’s not a rash. It’s different from a rash. And anyway it’s not just that, it’s her leg, her hair caught fire – remember that? – right here at this table. Ever since we moved here there’s just been – oh for goodness sake, Michael, will you please stop picking your dick when I’m trying to talk to you!’
Like many men, Michael had a habit of adjusting his scrotum for comfort of positioning when he was at home, a private thing that he felt he had a right to do in his own house, which was fair enough, but no matter how much she tried Melissa couldn’t stand it.
‘Look,’ he said exasperated, ‘I have a penis, OK?’
‘I know, and I feel sorry for you. Why can’t you just keep it to yourself, huh? Why do you always have to make me aware of it in such a crude way?’
This seemed like the perfect time, as they were in the subject area, to make his confession, which under the circumstances did not come out in quite the way he had intended, as there was a touch of nastiness in it. He wanted to make her feel bad, to remind her, indeed, of the importance of this very scrotum, its neglect at her hand, which had thus necessitated the excursion into another aperture. He said, ‘Well, someone’s got to be aware of it. In fact someone has been aware of it, someone … else —’
Then he stopped, losing scrotum, therefore adjusting it again in his anxiety which made Melissa hate him, more, actually, for this second adjustment in such a short space of time, than for the content of his confession, which in this moment seemed quite by-the-by.
She laughed at him. ‘Oh, really? So what, you’re seeing someone now?’
He became meek, like a little boy anticipating punishment, but there was a smugness in it, he wanted the punishment. ‘I wouldn’t say I was seeing someone. I’m not seeing her. There were just a couple of times, when, stuff happened. It’s not still going on …’
But she didn’t seem to be listening any more. She was neatening the place mat pile with a crazy exactitude, not even looking at him. Her face had faded from awareness and turned its dark corner. ‘Those mats are straight,’ he said. ‘Do you hear what I’m saying to you? It was just a stupid glitch when I was feeling like I needed some attention.’ He was thinking of the John Legend song in his head, Number One, the gist of which was going to be the finale of this explanation. ‘And I wanted you to know about it, so that we could —’
Again she laughed, giggled this time and shook her head. Melissa had a tendency to giggle when extremities of feeling were all cluttered together in her brain – frustration, anger, hurt, disgust, hunger. ‘Men think they are better than grass,’ she said.
‘What?’
‘It’s from a poem, by W.S. Merwin. Men really do think they’re better than grass. I understand exactly what that line could mean now. I didn’t quite get it when I first read it but I liked it so I made a note of it. I mean, what makes you think I give a shit? Grass grows. Trees stay standing. Wind carries. You men think the whole world is your dick. Well, I can tell you that it’s not. You can spare me all the details and the emotional backstory, honestly, it’s fine, Michael, you are free to wave it where you please. Frankly it’s one less thing for me to think about.’
Michael was taken aback. Where was her lava, the avalanche? Where was her feeling, her goddamn heart? ‘Hold on a minute. Do you love me?’ he said.
‘What?’ She turned back to him from her departure into the kitchen, pausing in the doorway, against the fiery glow of the paprika floor.
‘Do you love me?’
‘Why are you asking me that now?’
‘Because I seriously want to know. I’m interested. Go on.’
His face was twisted, older than it had been just a few minutes ago. He looked shabby and weak. Melissa felt sorry for him, and she was suddenly full of an old image of their big love and it made her sad. She missed him. She missed them. Somewhere she was hurt, because he had belonged to her through that love, but she couldn’t quite feel the hurt as her own, couldn’t work out whether it was there only because it was supposed to be there. Who was she, really, inside? It was as if there were two of her, one at the back, drowning, and one at the front.
‘It’s not exactly the absolute greatest time to ask me a question like that now, is it?’ she said.
‘Of course she loves you, Daddy,’ came a smaller voice from beyond, through the double doors, from the bathroom. The door kicked open, there was a clattering of crutches, and there was Ria, naked, leaning with one arm on a crutch and the other hand holding the door handle. Her damp black curls were loose and sleek and falling down her face like a slow black prehistoric waterfall. Her eyes were huge, bulbous and shining, the lashes like sooty sunrises. She was a vision of early brownness, the most beautiful broken thing they had ever seen.
‘Hey,’ Michael said softly, crouching, reaching out his hand to her, as though to a saviour.
She hopped towards him. He wanted to cry. There is something monstrous about seeing your child limping.
‘Can you buy me a present?’ she said when she reached him, when he was holding her hands and looking up into her face. ‘For when my cast comes off?’
Ria knew, at this moment, that she could ask anything and would receive. She smiled for them, enjoying the attention. She knew her power.
‘Just one,’ she said, ‘a small one.’
Michael grabbed her, folding her into his lap, glancing down at her hands.