2

Rabbit

I see them. At the very bottom of my grandmother’s garden. The rabbits.

In the grass beside the hedge between the redcurrant bushes, I see them sometimes during the day but most often when it is either early or late and the light is lustreless, on the brink of either coming or going. It surprises me to learn that rabbits are crepuscular. Flopsy, Mopsy, Cotton-tail. Peter and Roger and Thumper and Bugs. I realise I know very little about how actual rabbits actually live. Do they hibernate? Mate for life? Eat insects in addition to greenery? And what is it about dusk and dawn? Are they able to tell when it’s light enough to see their way, yet dark enough that it’s difficult for others to see them?

Whatever the rabbity logic, out they come from the hedge, nibbling, hopping. A family of brown splodges between the overlong grass and ragged shrubs. All except one, who is completely black. How does a wild rabbit in a cohort of brown rabbits come to be black? I think at once of Watership Down; I wonder is the black rabbit Death.

‘Bright eyes . . .’ Blah blah, something something.

 

After the first time I saw it, I mentioned the extraordinary rabbit to my mother on the phone, and she told me it was not so extraordinary.

‘It will have escaped from a hutch,’ she said, ‘or it’ll be the descendant of a rabbit who escaped from a hutch, still carrying the old black gene.’

My mother knows everything. I used to think all mothers did but in recent years I’ve come to realise it’s just mine. My mother alone knows that, in point of fact, nothing is extraordinary.

 

When I was little I had a friend called Georgina who lived a quarter mile up the road. For her sixth birthday, she got a white rabbit and named it Snowball. For roughly a fortnight, Snowball lived in a pretty timber hutch on the back lawn, fortressed by a wire mesh run. Then one morning, Georgina went out to find a jagged hole in the mesh and the rabbit gone. Her mother told her this wasn’t the horrific tragedy it appeared; Snowball had simply made the decision to go and live in the fields with her wild friends instead. Georgina passed this story on to me in the playground, and I passed it on to my sister, and she laughed and declared it a load of crap.

Now it seems she was wrong to be so cynical so young.

 

I didn’t sleep in any of my grandmother’s beds last night. I returned to the living room sofa to see out The Late Late Show. Then I nodded off and when I woke again it was The Afternoon Show and I had to get up and peek out the curtain to check if it was actually afternoon. But outside the sky was still sable, the cows still huddled against the hedge, the turbine’s eyes still glowing. And it came as a revelation to me that daytime television is repeated at night; that you can live your whole waking life over again in the dark.

 

Works about Bed, I test myself: Tracey Emin, 1998. My Bed, she called it, but Emin’s artwork was not simply the disarranged item of furniture upon which she slept, and it wasn’t simply about furniture or sleeping or even disarrangement. There were cigarette butts and besmirched knickers. Bunched-up tights and empty bottles of vodka. Moccasins and newspapers and a white toy poodle sitting obediently back on his haunches, regarding everything. It was about feeling shit first thing in the morning. About tossing beneath the covers, not wanting to get up and yet making everything worse by not getting up. It was about workaday despair.

And yet people were so angry over that bed; they did not realise it was the easiest piece of art in the world with which to identify.

 

The last night I spent in my city bedsit, I didn’t sleep on my colonised mattress with the parasite dust-mites. I didn’t sleep anywhere; I didn’t sleep.

By the time I’d completed negotiations with my mother, the yearning to cry had passed. Having arrived at a starting decision, I felt calmed, encouraged. And so, I phoned my landlady and told her that an unforeseen emergency was forcing me to renege on my lease.

I didn’t take any care in packing; I didn’t care. I wrenched my postcards and photos and clippings from the walls, wrapped my cacti in aluminium foil, bundled my clothes into a bin liner, boxed my books with the contents of my sock drawer, my shoes with the contents of my fridge. And once every garment and ornament and utensil had been wrapped and bundled and boxed from sight, I lugged it all out into the hallway.

 

It was late when my phone rang. I don’t know how late but the street-lamp sensors had long since sensed it was time to light, my neighbouring bedsits long since fallen silent. It was Jess again, and because I still contained some calm and courage, I answered. I told her I did not feel so good, that my mum was coming for me in the morning, and in less than half an hour, Jess arrived on her bicycle with, in a red leather satchel strapped to her back carrier, two bottles of red wine and a box of Black Magic.

Jess is my tall, blonde friend. Stylish and buxom with a crop of marvellously fine yellow hair. Outgoing and popular such that I never understood why she bothered hanging around with plain and shy and solitary, unpopular me. But Jess was only bright and boisterous in a crowd. Once it was just us, she’d contract and release her inner bleakness. She was on a low dose of antidepressant medication and wasn’t supposed to mix the pills with alcohol, though she often did. ‘If I can’t have a few drinks I’m only going to be depressed anyway,’ she’d say. It didn’t stop them from working; it only made her get drunk faster. And this was always fine by me because I get drunk fast on alcohol alone.

‘The pills are just a new sort of sadness,’ she’d say. ‘Softer, slyer.’

On the last night I spent in my bedsit in the city, Jess and I did what we’d done many nights before in similar but less symbolic circumstances. We washed a box of Black Magic down with two bottles of Cabernet Sauvignon. We confusedly attempted to put our chaotic world to rights. Raspberry parfait, orange sensation, caramel caress, and then at some godawful early hour, Jess remembered to ask me: ‘Have you told Ben you’re leaving?’ And with the last almond crunch and my ambling thumb I sent him a maudlin text message which I have long since deleted from my phone in disgust.

 

Ben, Jess and I had worked together in the gallery, but because it was gallery policy never to extend more than a twelve-month contract to part-time staff, none of us did any more, and there was no reason for us to be friends, and I can’t remember exactly why it was that we were still trying to be.

Ben replied fast. A casual message asking if I’d need a hand loading my mother’s car. I accepted. We arranged a time for the morning and bid one another a polite goodnight. I reported this back to Jess, but she only nodded and sipped. She only looked drunk and drugged and tired.

 

After the wine and chocolate and rectification was all done, off she wobbled. My tall, blonde friend, home through the deserted streets on her retro bicycle. I stood in my gateway and watched her wheeling from pool of street-lamp light to pool of street-lamp light until she reached the corner and threw me a bockety wave.

My last night in the city, I didn’t sleep.

I vomited up a bucket of burgundy sick. Rolled listlessly on the carpet for an hour. Got up to clean.

Swept and scrubbed. Scraped blue spores from the windowsill and black ones from the wall behind the bedstead, combed a soft mountain of moulted hair from the amber carpet, knocked the cobwebs down and scratched my Blu-Tack from the peach paint with a blunt bread knife.

At last the bedsit was as empty and clean as I found it. As characterless, as cold. And out in the hallway, the swaddled trappings of my independent life lay like dead bodies in the wake of a murderous typhoon.

 

I see him now, the black one. This morning, I don’t bother showering or changing my clothes. I don’t even brush my teeth. People are too clean nowadays, I think. We are all too clean and take too many antibiotics and when the bird flu and swine flu and fruit bat flu arrive, it’ll serve us right. But not me, not any more. I tidy last night’s dinner plate and wine glass away. I make a coffee, carry it down to the sun room. And here he is at the end of the garden. The Death Rabbit all surrounded by his paler brethren.

 

Works about Bed, I thought of another one: Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Untitled, 1991. In 1992, the same gigantic image appeared on twenty-four different billboards around the city of New York. A photograph of a double bed. Sheets dishevelled, pillows indented by an absent pair of heads. There was no accompanying text, no title, but I know from secondary sources that the absent heads were those of the artist and his partner who, in 1991 and 1996 respectively, died of AIDS.

This is the best of conceptual art: by means of nominal material, vast feeling is evoked. A message enduring long after the posters have been replaced by car ads and clothes ads and Coke ads at Christmas.

Its message: appreciate the people around you. Don’t re-plump their pillows until they return safely in the evening.

 

My father comes to mow my grandmother’s lawn. It is Sunday. Only on a Sunday could he allow himself to fritter away the afternoon on somebody else’s overgrown grass.

For my father, mowing is a leisure pursuit, as is axing up a week’s worth of kindling, rotavating the potato patch, replenishing the oil and wiper water in everybody’s car, and he saves all such leisurely jobs concerning gardens and family for Sundays. On Monday through Friday, my father works in a sand and gravel quarry. Operating heavy machinery, handling industrial explosives, transforming escarpments into rubble; that sort of thing.

When I was a kid, I used to try and make his job sound more sophisticated in front of my friends, one little girl called Caitriona in particular, whose father had some sort of high-flying office-based occupation which required a tie and an arduous daily commute. ‘My dad works in the min-er-al-ex-tract-ion-in-dust-ree,’ I’d say, which was a far cry from his own explanation. ‘I make big rocks into small rocks,’ he’d say, and chuckle.

 

I watch my father from the window.

A man of sixty in a lumberjack shirt jouncing about atop a miniaturised tractor. Feet hitched up and perched on a narrow platform either side, moving unsettlingly fast for a front garden so small, so obstructed by flower beds. He draws perfectly parallel trails of new green as he goes, kicking up the cut blades in a grass-storm behind him. From here, it almost looks as if his hair is still brown. From here, even his bald patch is too small to notice. ‘Your father was blond when I first met him,’ my mother often says, ‘and you and your sister were both blonde too when you were little.’ My mother signed up for a family of angel-heads and look at us now: mine dyed black and my sister’s sienna, our father’s thin in places, grey in places, gone.

He sees me at the window and I wave.

 

He’s almost finished the front now and he said that once he’s finished the front he’ll come in for a cup of tea. I’ve bought a box of teabags in preparation, white sugar and full-fat milk. A packet of cream crackers I dress up in Marmite and grated Cheddar, a packet of chocolate fancies I arrange on a cake plate. Now I totter it all down to the sun room on one of my grandmother’s tin tea trays. The mower engine has ceased its whingeing, and so I return again to the kitchen, set the whistling kettle to boil.

By the time I get back to the sun room, my father’s already on the sofa with a smattering of cracker crumbs across the chest of his shirt. He dusts them off and begins to give out about my grandmother’s overabundance of flower beds.

‘Remember the cosy?’ I interrupt as I pour, indicating the knitted cottage which covers the pot. ‘And the fancies?’ Sponge disc foundations topped by truffly brown blobs, coated with sprinkles. It’s years since I had a fancy. I used to nibble the sponge away first, save the blob until last. All my life I’ve eaten things in order of preference; whole dinner plates item by item, and individual items component by component.

My father looks baffled so I prompt him. ‘It’s the old Sunday tea cosy,’ I say, ‘and Grannie always used to buy fancies, or sometimes baby Battenbergs or sometimes Viennese swirls.’ Dad harrumphs his agreement, grabs a cake with a grubby fist and devours it in a single bite, making them seem not so fancy after all.

I should know that my father doesn’t pay attention to details such as these; I should know because for decades my mother and sister and I have played sneaky little games of let’s-see-how-long-it-takes-Dad-to-notice, and he never noticed, not once. The tongue piercing, the nose piercing, the lip.

 

In the space of a sunnyish, warmish fortnight, the grass has blasted up and broken out in daisies. There are daisies around the redcurrant bushes, daisies in the strawberry patch, daisies beneath the hedge where my mother buried the curios. I’ve never seen so many white specks since the lawn of the last house my grandmother lived in, as if she brought them with her—the soles of her shoes stuffed with seeds which shook free with every stamp.

It’s strange to have an afternoon tea I prepared myself with only my father for company. Usually it’s my mother who stacks the tray with coasters, saucers, shortbread, crustless sandwiches trickling bits of mashed, boiled egg, and my sister who steers the flow of cheerful chatter for the time it takes to empty two teapots, from obligatory savoury through to obligatory sweet. Now that it’s just Dad and I, the curmudgeonly ones, we don’t really know what to say to each other.

‘Well,’ he says. ‘How are you, then? Your mother’s woeful fucking worried.’

My father doesn’t really want to talk about my feelings. That would be excruciating for both of us. He only wants me to tell him that I am okay, so he can return to my mother and tell her there’s no need to worry.

‘I’m okay,’ I say. ‘There’s no need to worry.’

 

My parents did not want me to come here to stay. They are, like everybody, fearful of being completely alone and suspicious of people who choose to be. They hesitate, like everybody, to understand how it could heal me, as I believe it can. I believe: I am less fearful of being alone than I am of not being able to be alone.

 

But I say none of this. My father is not susceptible to philosophy.

Instead I ask him about the salt flats in Australia.

Because there was a time when he used to harvest salt in a place called Dampier. Now, in the sun room, my father talks about the piles he drove in the ocean, the cargo-ship jetty he raised. He talks about the aerodromes in Lincoln between which he laid underground pipes for refuelling Vulcan bombers during the Falklands War. ‘You were born then, during that war,’ he says and even though that was my sister, I don’t correct him, and I wonder whether all fathers do this: tell their children stories of the wide open life they led before we came along to confine it. My father owned a Land Rover and a caravan. He travelled from place to place, laying pipelines behind him as he went, frying rashers on the heat of his engine. My mother and sister travelled in the caravan with him until I was born. Then he bought a house, got a job as a quarry foreman. He put down roots. Tortuous, unyielding, necessary roots.

And so my father has every right in the world to be disappointed by the dog’s dinner I am making of the last life he gave up his own for.

But, of course, we don’t talk about this either.

 

Now I see he’s drained the mug, the time has come to ask him the thing I want to ask him: I’ve always longed to have a patch of personal wilderness. Of waist-high grass entwined with wild flowers through which I can prance; within which I can lie down and disappear from sight. I suspect the longing can be traced back to the opening sequence of every episode of Little House on the Prairie.

‘No way,’ my father says, before I’ve even finished conjuring it. ‘This bungalow is on the bloody market, you know.’

‘But Dad! There’s about a hundred reasons why it won’t sell before you’ve even reached the back garden. Nobody’s seriously going to be put off by having to give the grass a trim. They’re going to have to trim it at some point anyway . . . and then there’s the turbine, and then there’s the dog smell . . .’

‘It does reek of dog,’ my father says.

Jackpot.

 

He finishes up in under an hour. He loads the tractor lawnmower back into the car trailer and ambles around the shrubbery for a while, carrying my grandmother’s shears and wheeling her barrow. Finally he knocks on the glass of the sun room to rouse my attention, bids me an abrupt farewell, and is gone.

I go out to lock the gate. I can still hear the revving and rattling of his departure.

I realise I no longer care whether or not my father is sophisticated. He has more effervescence—more sturdy grace—than any man who ever wore a tie to an office.

 

Whenever I get very drunk at night, I always wake in the morning with a sonorous headache and a heightened sense of despair.

On the last night I spent in my city bedsit, in the early hours of the morning, after everything was cleared and cleaned, I unpacked my stove-top coffee pot, stuffed it full of Authentic Italian Espresso Blend and began to brew. I decided that if I didn’t allow myself to fall asleep, then I wouldn’t have to wake up again and despair.

I sat at the desk where I’d drawn barely anything in several weeks, and where anything I did draw had turned out badly. I looked out the window as I drank my coffee, down to the roof of the washing machine shed. I saw how it was littered with short twigs and I remembered the treehouse which was actually a hut, and I wondered where they came from, the twigs, when there weren’t even any trees.

I listened to the birdsong, the grumble of trams, the click of my electricity meter. The shuffle and bump of the early-rising residents. I heard the girl who worked in Statoil slam the front door and then the gate behind her, and I heard the tin soldier scuff and tap, push down his toast and pause, then the ker-ching as it popped itself back up again.

I was waiting for my mother, for the landlady, and for Ben, but I had no idea what order they’d arrive in or what I was going to say to any of them when they did. At nine o’clock I left first my chair and then the bedsit, and went outside. The front garden was brown but the dew on the part of the lawn which the sun hadn’t yet reached was sharp to the touch, and sparkling.

 

Ben came first, as I was crouching, touching the sharp and sparkling lawn. I saw him round the corner, the collar of his army coat raised and his fists pushed down to the seams of his pockets. I waved up at him from my crouch. I wanted to thank him for putting up with me these past weeks; I wanted to apologise for my inconsistency. But I only waved when he was a short distance away and only said good morning once he had reached the gate, and then we only went inside.

Ben was disappointed that I’d already moved everything into the hall. He swept his arm through the air above my plastic necropolis.

‘You don’t need me at all,’ he said.

In my empty bedsit, we perched side by side on the tiny stools at the tiny breakfast bar. Normally I’d offer him a coffee, but I’d already packed the pot for a second time. The mugs, even the mug tree. And so we just perched there and tried to think of things to say.

‘Look, um, I just wanted to thank you,’ I said.

‘I haven’t done anything yet,’ he said, smiling. But this wasn’t what I meant and I assumed it was his way of swatting away a potentially serious conversation, and so I dropped it.

The meter clicked. The trams grumbled. A blackbird sang irreverently.

Hurdygurdy hurdygurdy hurdygurdy hurdygurdy hurdygurdy, it sang.

Then the intercom above the light switch buzzed. Downstairs and outside on the doorstep, the landlady and my mother had arrived in unison.

 

The landlady was called Loretta Nagle. She was uncommonly old and small but always made a point of informing me of how capable she was. During the months I lived beneath her roof, she claimed to be able to plunge out a blocked drain with a single hand, to work an electric drill to fix a shelf, to climb onto the roof and tweak a satellite dish gone awry. Yet I’d never seen her perform any such tasks; I can’t imagine a tenant had dared ask her to for fifteen years, at least. And so because she had never actually failed, I suppose Loretta continued to believe that she was still able.

The landlady was also uncommonly rich; Jess and I had worked it out once. She owned two houses in the same street, both divided into several bedsits each costing a minimum of one hundred euro a week. And once you have enough money, it doesn’t matter if you are old or small.

Once you have enough money, you can buy yourself youth and you can buy yourself magnitude.

 

On the morning I reneged on my lease, Loretta held both banisters and took two unsteady steps for every stair and I followed behind, pretending this was a normal pace, pretending I was equally slow. At last she closed the door of the empty bedsit behind us, to talk money and assess my cleaning job. Before the edge of the door hit the frame, I saw Ben and my mother below us in the hallway. Meeting each other for the first time. Together lifting and carrying my belongings away.

Loretta’s fingertips were white and puckered as though she was in a permanent state of having emerged from the bath. That morning she ran them across the countertop and squinted into the smelly darkness of my oven. Even though I could clearly see pocks in the paint where my pictures had come down, even though I was not legally entitled to my deposit back, still she counted five hundred euro in fifties out onto the breakfast bar and I thanked her, repeatedly. I simpered and fawned.

 

By the time Loretta and I had baby-stepped back down to the front door, my mother’s car was packed. Out on the footpath, Mum was making some final adjustments and there was a stranger lingering between the gateposts and speaking to Ben. A black man, no more than thirty, with close-cropped hair and pale blue jeans. Ben must have told him that the landlady had gone inside and would soon come back again, because he seemed to be waiting for her. When Loretta emerged he stopped speaking to Ben and stepped forward and held his hand out.

‘I’m Daniel,’ he said, ‘I’m here to see the studio apartment.’

Loretta held her arms firmly against her sides. Her eyes were blank.

‘There must be some mistake,’ she said: ‘there are no vacancies here.’

‘Mrs Nagle?’ Daniel said. ‘Number 26? You phoned me late last night. You told me to come and view it this morning . . .’

I caught my mother’s eye and nodded to let her know I was ready to leave. She turned to Ben and told him it was good to meet him and thanked him for his help. She climbed into the driver’s seat.

‘I can see these people are moving out,’ Daniel said, but Loretta would not budge.

‘There must be some mistake,’ she repeated: ‘there are no vacancies.’

I climbed into the passenger seat and rolled the window down and Ben leaned in.

‘Thanks again for . . .’ I said. He nodded.

‘Let me know, okay . . .’ he said. I nodded.

‘I’ll be alright now . . .’ I said, as if it were actually that simple, as if my mother was a magic potion which I could drink.

Behind us on the footpath, Daniel’s voice had dropped and hardened. I rolled the passenger window up and we pulled away. I twisted around in my seat and peered through the over-packed rear windscreen to wave to Ben. But he’d already raised his collar and shoved his fists into his pockets and turned around. He was already walking away.

 

I remember the first black person I saw in Lisduff; the first black person I ever saw anywhere. A woman with intricately braided hair, a dress printed in blazing tangerine and teal. She was beautiful and dazzling. We were in the old grocery store, so it must still have been the eighties, before the supermarket arrived. As soon as I saw her, I yanked Mum’s sleeve and started to yammer, and she swung down and hissed at me through gritted teeth, telling me to shut up and not make a show.

 

I have always suffered from this misconception: that my mother is a magic potion.

My sister and I went to a primary school small enough to domicile three different classes inside a single room and the single teacher would take turns to attend to each group, leaving the other groups with an exercise to complete. The school’s three teachers were all women of middle age, and back then I believed that it was only women of middle age who were authorised to be teachers. I was a smart child, or maybe just impatient. I always finished my exercises too fast. Then I’d lay my pencil down and glower out the window and contemplate how much I wanted to go home. I understood that the only circumstance which might permit a pupil to leave before the end-of-day bell was if they fell sick and their mother came to collect them. And so, each day as I glowered and contemplated, I longed to be sick.

 

The view out of every classroom window was the same. A grassy bank tasselled by pine trees. All year round, the trees blocked out the sky and barely changed. In deepest winter the grass would sallow and in late spring it would break out in dandelions. But for most of each season, there wasn’t much to look out at. My contemplations would slide into darker places. I knew that I could fake sick if I really wanted to, but as soon as we got home Mum would take my temperature and know. It seemed unlikely I’d get a chance to press the thermometer against a radiator like the boy in ET. And even without the betrayal of a thermometer, if I faked it, she’d know. The only solution was to actually feel sick and be telling the truth. And so, I’d hide my hands under the desk and poke myself hard in the stomach, over and over until it actually hurt, until I had a legitimate stomach ache. Then I’d release a hand and raise it high above my head.

My mother did not go out to work in those days and so was nearly always free to come and fetch me when the teacher phoned. In the car on the way home, I’d experience a feeling somewhere between triumph and guilt. I was not lying. I did feel sick. But I had also wanted to be; I had made myself.

 

I drop the latch and stand inside my grandmother’s front gate absentmindedly retying the string for ensuring nobody lets the dog out, forgetting there’s no dog to let out any more anyway.

I inhale my father’s cut grass. It makes me remember the depressed millionaire. I throw my head back and drink it through my nostrils, this most utopian of smells. I notice it unprompted, and so this means there are no signs of impending collapse—I must still be okay.

I set off around the side of the house in the direction of the plum trees. Dispersed across my grandmother’s garden are a number of strange objects. Several slimy sculptures carved in soft stone, mostly male figures with multiple, elongated limbs. A ceramic hippo, a timber cross marking Joe’s grave. A bench in the shape of a weird animal, buckled planks held in place by wrought-iron legs which taper into wrought-iron paws—too large for a cat and too small for a lion—and so my grandmother’s bench must be a lynx. There are two bird tables. A proper one mounted on a pole with varnished walls and a slanted roof, and an improvised one made from a steel saucepan lid nailed to a tree stump. Then there’s a basin full of rainwater in which I often see the small birds splashing in spite of both the baths.

I pass it all by: the lynx, the paddling birds, the stone men, the dog skeleton.

 

Dad has done a stellar job on my wilderness. At ground level it’s a meadow in Minnesota but at eye level, with the plum trees about to fusillade into blossom, it’s a Japanese woodblock. There’s hardly any wind and so the turbine is only murmuring. The sun comes out and turns up the contrast on everything. It makes me want to paint even though I cannot paint. I have always been too inclined towards geometric shapes, precise lines and regimented pencil scratching. I have never been limp-wristed and free-spirited enough to paint.

I follow the path my father mowed for me, to the cow-field fence which marks the garden’s end. Here between the nettle patch and compost heap where he dumped the clippings the smell of cut grass and psychological stability is at its strongest. I lean over to inhale again, and here I find a rabbit. Perfectly dead.

 

It’s grey-brown and only a kit, neither bloody nor battered. I presume my father spotted it chewing the tulips and clouted its skull with the butt of his shears. A single, clean blow. Every year, rabbits raid his lettuce bed, nibble down his baby leeks, rummage up his daffodil bulbs. Peter and Roger and Thumper and Bugs are vermin to my father, as are the slugs he pellet-poisons, as are the pigeons he shoots and nails to a timber post alongside his vegetable patch as a warning to the other pigeons.

 

The baby rabbit, so frail and sweet, is slumped atop a pretty mess of onion skins, palm fronds, wilted laurel. I go back to the house to fetch my camera. Now to the greenhouse, to fetch the trowel. I have to bow down over the compost heap to get my shot. I can feel the nettles stinging my kneecaps through the threadbare part of my jeans. I remember refusing to believe my mother when she told me that it was more dangerous to lightly brush against a nettle than to grab on and tightly clutch. I remember rubbing a dock leaf against my sting, after I’d put my mother’s information to the test, until it was worn down to its stem, my skin green and sticky.

I take the photograph. I trowel a parting in the pretty mess. I roll the kit in and cover it.

 

I rested my forehead against the passenger window as my mother drove me away from my bedsit.

I watched the city dwindle into suburbs and industrial estates.

My mother has owned the same cadmium-red Ford Estate since the late eighties. It always declines to start on cold mornings, chugs and splutters in wet weather. It fails the NCT every year—three times, at least—before it passes, yet whenever my mother mentions getting a new one, my sister and I protest, vigorously, as if the car’s an old pet she wants to put down. Before the days of mandatory safety belts, we played all kinds of make-believe games in the seatless boot space. Around the time we were into Jaws, we’d pretend it was a pool of sea off Amity Island and take turns to be the shark; around the time we were into The Diary of Anne Frank we’d pretend it was a secret attic and take turns to be the SS. Once I even fell out of my mother’s car. I was four or five. It was before the days of central locking and she’d forgotten to push my button down. The door swung free as we rounded a bend. It was just a few yards from home and the car wasn’t travelling very fast. Out I tumbled into the ditch and suffered an almighty nosebleed.

‘Ben seems nice,’ Mum said, ‘really nice.’ Her voice was cautiously upbeat.

‘It doesn’t matter now anyway,’ I said, and drew my feet up onto the seat and clutched my knees and tried to vanquish the sobs with thoughts of things which were not Ben. I considered the dust-mites raised up on my dead skin and whether or not they would survive until a new tenant arrived.

We filtered onto the motorway and left the concrete behind. We passed cabbage fields and mud-caked sheep, trees so bare they seemed to consist of more negative space than timber. After several miles, my mother spoke again. The cheer had dropped out of her voice.

‘I don’t know,’ she said, ‘if you’re hubbubing because of something, or because there’s something wrong with you.’

My limbs mangled about the passenger seat. My leaking nostrils pressed into my sleeve. My leaking eyes fixed on the windscreen, flicking between the paper discs and the stalled wipers. It was then that the heightened sense of unfounded despair I thought I’d managed to stave off came clattering down. I pressed my eyelids together and pictured the windscreen I’d just closed out; pictured the swirling, white oblong of sky brilliant, petrol blue instead.

 

When I was a child, I used to believe there was a sky roof. Perhaps every child does, but I had a very particular panorama in my head, replete with all the floated-away stuff which had snagged there. Balloons, kites, bubbles, plastic bags.

Now I wonder if flying birds become deranged in the same way as penguins? And if this is what ultimately halts them? The sky roof.

 

Works about Sky, I test myself: Cai Guo-Qiang. Well known for his work involving pyrotechnics. Beginning in the early nineties, using lengthy trails of gunpowder, he made a series of ambitious environmental works. One beneath the ocean spanning a thirty-thousand-metre stretch of the coastline of Japan. Another along ten thousand metres of the Gobi Desert, beginning where the Great Wall finishes. The series is called Project for Extraterrestrials, and so, of course—it’s actually about communication.

 

I despise my mother’s use of words that are not words. Like ‘hubbub’. As if she is the child.

‘Because of nothing,’ I said. ‘Because there’s nothing right with me. Because I cannot fucking help it.’

I knew it was unnecessary to swear, that I would not have sworn at Ben or Jess, nor would I have cried in front of them, but the rules are different with my mother. With my mother, there are no rules. When I opened my eyes again, the cloud had solidified. Mum was staring out the oblong. Her eyeballs had turned twinkly. She took a CD from the stack between us and pushed it gently into the slot. It was the Easy Rider soundtrack I gave her for her birthday last year. From somewhere deep inside a box on the back seat behind us, there came the sigh of an unknown object being slowly crushed beneath the pressure of its fellow objects, and all the while, the Holy Modal Rounders snarled from the dashboard, something about wanting to be a bird.