Fiona places the book on the littered surface of her daughter’s chest of drawers. After twenty minutes reading The Little Grey Men to Gracey, she’s been reaching the end of sentences with little idea what they were about. Thoughts of things unconnected to gnomes have drifted in and out of the story. Ghosts in her muscles continue to hang curtains and stroke a paintbrush at walls that Tom stripped and cleaned. A thick smell of emulsion has deadened her sinuses to competing scents. Even though she wore gloves, her fingertips are stained.
Gotta get them clean for work tomorrow. Iron your blouse. Gracey’s uniform. Is there a clean cardy? We haven’t done her home learning.
‘Gnomes in the wood, Mommy? Maybe they’re gonna look after New Waddles ’til Daddy finds him.’
Fiona wades from the chop and swell of her preoccupation, drifts ashore to her daughter. ‘Don’t even go thinking about that place. It’s out of bounds.’
And then, from outside, she hears Tom’s raised voice and her skin is frostbitten. He’s gone next door. She asked him not to. Then told him not to. He never answered, just kept on drinking that second glass of rum. She knew he was troubled when he returned with Archie, distracted and masking what looked like fear with a nervous smile. And the way he spoke to Gracey, like he’d just witnessed an accident and was pressing another witness for details…
Fiona’s been busy since, getting Gracey bathed in a puddle of lukewarm water, collected from the trickle the exhausted boiler drip-feeds the bath. Drying her hair, finding pyjamas, fielding requests, while Tom paced the kitchen, eventually coming to rest upon his knuckles, looming over the sink, looking at nothing. Even when she was one floor up, she knew he was doing that. His lips would have been moving too. An actor rehearsing lines for a performance. Just getting my head straight , he’d said, when she came down and asked him to check the air in her car’s tyres.
Bastards next door put a dead fox in a tree to warn us away from going in there.
You don’t know it was them , she’d said.
Bloody do!
There’s no point arguing with him when he’s like that.
A couple of glasses of fiery rum dissolved the last threads restraining the angry giant inside her husband. And he’s next door now, the thud of his palms against the Moots’ front door carrying across to her and Gracey. Tom’s voice follows but sounds so far away. ‘Hey! Hey! A word! Hey! I know you’re in there!’
Gracey peers at her mum. Fiona looks at the curtains and bites her bottom lip, aware of the little face turned toward her, pale, as if a light is held under her chin; a small, questing mind studying her expression, probing for signs of dissonance within the harmony of Mommy, Daddy, Gracey and Archie. Fiona feels like she’s holding her breath for most of each day now.
Tom from afar: ‘What! Do! You! Think! You are playing at? Eh! A dead animal! To frighten a little girl! You hanged it there! You nasty, cruel, small-minded cowards!’
Gracey will have seen this mum-face before and Fiona has glimpsed this very expression herself on many reflective surfaces: the deepening of hairline fractures around her eyes and mouth into fissures. And she always winces.
But she’s had good reason to worry herself sick since Tom’s contract finished, following three years of steady employment, earning the salary they’d used to secure the mortgage. Another four months of sporadic employment followed in which her husband either wasn’t paid what was agreed or was doing twice the work agreed but only paid for what was agreed. Even the dregs of leave cover he managed to claw up, on unfair terms and remuneration, have evaporated. His efforts since to tap old contacts and scratch a few half-chances from the air have also been in vain. And now he’s desperate, trying too hard and really disliking himself when reduced to this. He’s filling the gap by fixing up the house – it’s all working out if you think about it, as I’ll get the house ready sooner this way – and boring a bigger crevice into their dwindling savings, while they make do with her job at the bank.
She can cover the mortgage payments and her petrol, the food. Nothing else. They will need to pay bills, buy building materials, pay tradesmen … the roof, wiring, plumbing, plastering . He’s got to cover that.
This house will never stop taking what they have. She can smell its terminal illness, the constant need of the sickness in the mildewed plaster, in the dusty air currents she hears like wheezes, dragging the dead skin of ages from beneath the floorboards and into their lungs. And this is just the start. They’re not nurses, they’re undertakers.
‘Dad losing his shit again?’
Fiona is startled back into the room by Gracey’s use of that word. She knows Gracey’s acquired it from her, when she’s talking on the phone to her own mother.
Fiona meets Gracey’s earnest eyes and she wants to burst with laughter and tears at the same time.
* * *
When she comes into the kitchen, Tom’s refilling his glass with neat rum.
‘I reckon they got the message. Even if it was delivered through the bloody letter box. They were hiding. I could hear the old bastards. Like rats in the dark.’
Fiona settles upon a stool at the kitchen counter and watches her husband while waiting for a pause in his tirade, or a crinkle of doubt in his eyes, before she speaks. His blood is up.
‘That’s animal cruelty. They’re not farmers or hunters. Can’t just kill an animal and use it as some kind of territorial marker. On public land. It’s mediaeval. Who the fuck do they think they are?’
She wonders if one thing has become mixed up with another thing in his mind; if he is transferring his disappointment onto the neighbours. But she won’t engage with him when he’s like this; even finds that she can’t now, like she’s had enough of him and is as bored by him as she is angry with him.
‘I’ve work to do. That skirting won’t put itself up in the front room. I’ve wasted enough time looking for a fucking penguin and a dog. Jesus wept.’
Fiona looks at her watch. ‘It’s late.’
Tom ignores her and leaves the room.