THE HARDWARE SHOP is dusty and cluttered, with a muddy, masculine smell that at once revolts and reassures her. There is a teenage boy at the till and a white-haired man sitting on a stepladder. The man goes downstairs to look for the bug bombs. He returns waving a tiny rectangular box above his head.
‘Here you are, love,’ he says. ‘The last one.’
Valerie follows him to the till, looking as she goes at the rows of nails and brackets and screws, each presented in a trough with letters and numbers written on a label above them – codes she cannot read. She tries to keep her gaze away from the rumpled, pink face of the man: too much colour against the blanched hair and all around his eyes creases cramming like the unready petals of a peeled poppy bud.
‘Unusual this time of year,’ he says, handing the box to the boy. ‘You must keep the house very warm, love, is it?’
‘Oh,’ says Valerie. ‘Yes, I suppose perhaps.’
The man leans over the boy’s shoulder, pointing at the till. ‘There.’ He says it softly, like a pleasant secret. ‘Press Open, then Pets, and then you can put in the price... It’s on the back. Turn it over – there, y’see?’
His voice is louder for Valerie, his accent clipped clean of nuance: ‘Do you have a dog, do you? Or a cat?’
‘A dog, yes. My husband’s dog.’
‘That’s what it is. Has it a flea collar? There’s flea tablets you can give them too, you know? Might be the best thing.’
The man points as he speaks. His fingers have an inflated look, spongy and pale – the nakedness of roots grown blind beneath a garden slab. Valerie wonders how that can be, given that he is in the business of hammers and nails and soil.
While the boy confuses the till, Valerie moves to a small pet section in the corner and chooses a flea collar for Toby, some flea tablets, and some dog treats to hide the tablets in. When she brings them back to the till, the boy is still struggling. The drawer jangles open and the man slides it closed again. ‘Don’t mind that,’ he tells the boy. ‘Start again. Just take your time.’ He explains to Valerie how to use the bug bomb, warning her that there are rotten chemicals in it.
‘Leave the house for the day,’ he says. ‘That’s what I’d do, no two ways about it. D’you’ve any kids, do you?’
‘One. A baby.’
‘Keep him out of the house for the day.’
‘A girl. Yes, she goes to crèche, so...’
She tries to imagine 82 cubic metres because the man says that’s how far the poison spreads. She asks him is there anything else he has, because her house is quite large and one bomb won’t be enough for the upstairs and the downstairs. He sends the boy to get a spray for the furniture.
‘You’re sure it’s fleas?’ he says, pulling a reel of paper from the top of the till – a translucent strip with rows of ghostly purple zeros printed on it. He tears the paper off and throws it in a basket by his feet.
‘Yes,’ says Valerie.
‘You’ve seen them?’
‘Yes.’
‘You can’t kill them by squashing – you know that? You have to roll them.’
‘Oh yes. I know.’
A few days after they began, Valerie looked it up on her husband’s computer. Rolling, not squashing, said the Internet, and vacuuming. Vacuuming everything over and over. She has vacuumed twice this morning – that’s what had Joanna late for crèche – and right now Dolores will be arriving to do the weekly clean. Valerie left a note instructing her to vacuum everywhere, and to bleach all the floors.
The man ducks beneath the counter.
‘Unusual this time of year,’ he calls. ‘Unusual for Ireland actually, to tell you the truth, love.’
He reappears flushed and pleased, wire-cutters in his hand.
‘I wasn’t going to order in any more of them bombs, we sell so few. It’s more in the heat you’d tend to get fleas. The continent. Rotten stuff in them things. Should be banned.’
The teenager returns with the spray, his face set in eager determination as he approaches the till. He smiles for approval as he gives Valerie her change, still smiles as he puts it all in a blue plastic bag with Carrier Bag printed across it in faint black letters, nods like a man as she takes it.
Valerie stows it immediately in her spacious cream leather handbag. She doesn’t want to arrive at the hairdresser swinging that flimsy carrier bag like something haggled from a street seller, bright bug spray glinting through the cheap plastic.
*
At Saphron Hair Design Valerie catches herself in the mirror, being helped into the black robe like an invalid, and she can see at a glance that her new gold-sheen lipstick ages her and that her eyes are overdone. She sits on the swivel chair and looks down to avoid the mirrors all around her; the shock of her profile, the dregs of shadow settling beneath her eye sockets. She will ask for her roots to be done today. Then she will feel better.
A man puts his hands on her shoulders and speaks to her reflection. He says his name is Justin and he will cut her hair today because her usual stylist, Lauren, is out sick. His smile, she knows, is meant to reassure, but he can’t conceal the sneer on his lips when she tells him she likes it the same every time. His gaze flitters over her pearl-stud earrings, her kitten heels. ‘Sure. If you find a way that works for you... why change?’ He has a quiff like a tidal wave, a gold hoop spearing the flesh of his brow.
‘Well yes exactly,’ says Valerie.
Fashions come and go, but every woman has an ideal hair length for her face shape; when she finds it, she should stick to it. It was Valerie’s confirmation day when her mother explained that. They had a girl in to do her hair, and Valerie sat at her mother’s vanity table, in her new blue suit with the shoulder pads and the sailor collar. She requested an up-style, but her mother shook her head.
‘Know your own face, my girl. Every woman has an ideal hair length, but it’s only a clever woman who knows what it is.’
Side by side in the mirror, they looked together at all the secrets of Valerie’s face. Valerie might make the most of herself, her mother explained, by letting her hair fall just to her chin, giving her a bit of a jawline and sweeping inwards, to soften her look. When she was finished speaking, her mother stood behind her, wrapped her hands firmly around Valerie’s shoulders as though to strengthen her, and sighed into the mirror.
While her hair is cut, Valerie leafs through a magazine from beginning to end, then starts at the beginning again. Her fringe is still clamped up in a big green clip when the hairdresser abruptly stops cutting. Valerie’s breath snags, and, keeping her head down, she glances up carefully at the mirror. The hairdresser is frowning a little, pecking slowly at her scalp with long, clean fingers. She swallows quietly, forces her eyes back to the magazine – a ‘sneaky snap’ taken from far away, that shows the naked face of a celebrity on a hotel balcony. Valerie always uses a lice treatment before a hair appointment, and a leave-in repellent – she has nothing to worry about. But there is a twinge behind her ear, a twitching impulse to scratch. She forces breath out slowly through her teeth. She can feel the drag of her own cheeks, the foolish heaviness of her mouth, lipstick cloying.
‘What colour did you say you usually go for?’
‘Oh,’ says Valerie, ‘Caramel 06 is the one Lauren uses.’
Red rings have been drawn around the flaws in the star’s face. Guess who has crow’s feet? says the title.
*
On the walk to Grafton Street, Valerie keeps her eyes on the pavement ahead. She can feel how her new haircut sleeks over the contours of her skull and curls girlishly at the nape, making the shape of her head painfully conspicuous. She will need to sort herself out before shopping. She tugs a lock in around her chin. It’s supposed to draw a nice curve around her face, but the man has made her hair a little too short, exposing the rough cut of her jaw. Already, she is dreading collecting Joanna from crèche. The minders will notice she has had her hair done. They will try to compliment her or, worse, they will say nothing but giggle together when she is gone. They will think the hair is too youthful for her face.
*
The cosmetics department is Valerie’s favourite part of the store, and she always does a little browsing before picking up her monthly skincare supplies. Today she is distracted, though, flitting from counter to counter but collecting no samples, making no enquiries, taking nothing in. To take advantage of the free gift offer, she buys two bottles of her usual cleansing milk instead of one. The girl at the counter is beautifully made up in this season’s mango-yellow eyeshadow and coral-pink lipstick. They are the kind of colours Valerie might buy and never wear. You need delicate features and a porcelain complexion for colours like that.
‘It’s a great offer,’ says the salesgirl.
‘Yes.’
Martin often teases Valerie about her lust for bargains. He tells their friends about it – ‘Vie knows all about shopping! Shopping is Vie’s speciality! Nothing a woman loves more than to spend her husband’s money. Am I right, lads?’ and the husbands laugh, and she smiles, and the wives roll their eyes in sympathy, ‘Oh don’t mind him, Val. My Brian is just the same...’
Valerie’s mother used to say that your skin is the one thing you are stuck with, the one thing you must look after. These days she has to make a particular effort to keep her skin decent. Since the baby it has grown temperamental and prone to blotches.
After the birth her cheeks were covered with fine red lines and pricks of blood that twinkled like mocking stars. They were burst vessels, the nurse said, from the pressure of pushing. They would clear up in no time. The swollen lips were nothing to worry about either; they were a result of her biting down for the final push, determined not to scream, not to make a spectacle of herself.
‘Is that the baby?’ she’d said when the head showed. ‘Yes,’ said the midwife, ‘touch it.’ But she hadn’t. ‘Are you sure that’s the baby?’ – because the head, faceless and purplish, looked like it could have been her own insides – a kidney or a prolapse. When they pulled the rest of it out, it hadn’t cried as she’d expected. ‘Is it over?’ she said. ‘Can I sleep now?’
The nurse pried something from its mouth with polythene hands, and Valerie heard a faint mewl. They handed it to her wrapped in a green towel and told her it was a perfect baby girl. It cried then, but only a little, with no enthusiasm. In its open mouth a wound-pink tongue curled like a fern. Its fingers stretched wire-tense and gossamer-fine, casting dark shadows on the lap of her polka-dotted hospital gown.
*
The salesgirl slides the gift into a tasteful beige bag beside the cleansers and ties everything up with a neat black bow.
‘I’ve popped in a nice sample of our hand cream,’ she says.
‘Oh that’s lovely,’ says Valerie. ‘Thank you. I might give it to my mother. She’s in a home now, you know, but she still likes to look after herself, never without her hand cream and lipstick...’
‘Oh,’ the girl nods, ‘that’s a nice idea. I’ll give you another one then, for yourself.’
The girl doesn’t understand what Valerie is telling her; her mother – Mummy – who has always been the smell of soap, and ironing water, and Red Door perfume, who has always known how things should be done, is old now, and in a home, and sits all day by the window, and makes an ugly sucking with her mouth. She can no longer oversee a room of dinner guests, making matches and soothing out old resentments with her quiet, dignified gait and soot-heavy lids.
It’s when Valerie reaches into her handbag that it happens – the barely perceptible landing weight and in an instant the tiny prick, building already towards an itch. She feels for her wallet and grips it hard, squeezes her lips against the compulsion to scratch the back of her wrist. She would give way to madness if she responded to every sensation that moved over her skin, and she must not encourage her imagination, which is learning to taunt her with little stings and tickles. Even her eyes have started to play tricks – a speck of dust that hops; a cleft of wood that hatches larvae fine as the hairs on her child’s back.
Valerie looks up at the girl, who is patiently smiling. She smiles back, lifting out her hand, tilting her wrist very slightly to catch the shape of it. Yes. It’s there all right, angling on the hill of her knuckle, the fleck of its body poised for escape. She opens her purse. She will not make a spectacle of herself.
‘Take your time,’ the nice girl says. But Valerie can feel the red patches under her eyes, the perspiration on her palms.
*
The interior of her car is chemical-clean and air-conditioned. It is dim in the car park, but Valerie flicks on the roof lamp, a thatchy rectangle of yellow. She moves bits of herself into its glow. There is nothing on her ankles, nothing at her cleavage. She runs a palm around the back of her neck and down the lobes of her ears. There it is – from nowhere she feels it land. She raises her arm to the light, watches it pivot in the crook of her elbow, the humped back peaking puce with her blood. She brings her fingers down on the porridge-soft fold of skin, and presses firm. It bites again but she can feel it, a tiny grain beneath her touch. Ha! She has it.
It’s not the catching that’s the problem; it’s what to do afterwards. She rolls hard, pushing a finger back and forth until she is confident there is no risk of escape. Then she traps it expertly between thumb and forefinger and rolls it some more before leaning close to inspect it. It’s surely dead now, or crippled at least, legs like crushed lint; jagged, crooked filaments.
In the rear-view mirror, she examines the papery creases under her eyes, the thin film of skin restraining a liquid swell beneath. She will need to fix herself before collecting Joanna.
*
She parks in a loading bay, rushes in and out as though in a great hurry. ‘Come on, darling,’ she says to Joanna, loudly so that the girls – the pretty foreign classroom assistant and a trendy young mum with a baby on her back – understand she is not being rude. ‘Mummy is in a bit of a hurry today.’ She shakes Joanna into her coat, hooks on her bag. Joanna is a quiet, obedient child. She slips her hand into her mother’s, but Valerie can’t bear it – the coolness and certainty of the touch, the fine bones closing together like a bird’s wing. The itches are starting up again, convulsions of them running over her wrists and under her arms. She pulls her hand away, clutches the back of Joanna’s coat as she guides her across the road. It’s a beautiful coat – well cut, made from pure lambswool. Valerie was delighted to have found it in the January sales.
The flexibility of these thin arms always surprises her when she loops them into the straps of the child seat. She smooths the plaits either side of Joanna’s face, straightens her shoulders, light and round as ping-pong balls, and pushes her bottom into the cup of the seat before pinning the little chest with a final click. ‘There now,’ she says. She hands Joanna a box of raisins and switches on the DVD. The entertainment system is in the back of the headrest on the passenger seat. It makes journeys far more pleasant for everyone. They are educational cartoons, and it reassures her to hear Joanna shouting back at the characters, ‘Square!... Triangle!... Green!... Smaller!’
Valerie knows she is not what people call a ‘natural mother’. She is not ‘made for it’, the way some women are, with slings and breast pumps and all that. But she does her best. With what she has, she does her best.
*
Today Joanna is particularly quiet in the car. She is not replying to her DVD. As Valerie brakes at the lights, it dawns on her with irritating obviousness that the child could be choking on the raisins, and she twists her head around to check. But the raisins are forgotten. Joanna is occupied by the handbag. In all the flurry of fixing herself, Valerie left it in a mess on the back seat. Nothing has been put away in the designated pouches. It’s all lying on top: the gold-smeared tissue, blush-stained powder sheets, the tube of Barely Lipstick. The bag from the hardware shop is billowing messily through the zip-trimmed gash.
‘What did you buy, Mummy?’
It still surprises Valerie to hear Joanna speak. It began suddenly, when she was eighteen months old. There was no evident process to it, no first word. She hadn’t even said Mama. Then after her first week at crèche, Joanna began to talk. A little lisp at first, but she spoke in slow, correct sentences, and she was polite – always please and thank you and pardon. Now, at two and a half, she speaks like an adult. On hearing the child request her teddy last night – ‘Mummy, please may I have Lucy Bunny? Thank you very much, Mummy’ – Martin gave a satisfied, nasal chuckle.
‘Glad we’re getting our money’s worth! The price of that place...’
But this sudden articulacy, these precocious manners, only make Valerie feel separate from the child, wary of her, and sorry for her willingness to learn the rules.
Valerie tilts the rear-view mirror to look at Joanna more comfortably. Her daughter straightens herself into her default position: ankles crossed, shoulders back. She is small for her age with a straight, flat fringe and sweeping lashes; an eerily dainty creature. Valerie allows her gaze to travel up her daughter’s body – the waxy nubs of knees, the boxy pinafore, the too-fine hands resting one on top of the other on her lap, her whole presence dispassionately tidy and compact. She is an unusual sort of child certainly, not boisterous or messy like other toddlers. If you didn’t like her, thinks Valerie, you might call her prissy.
‘They’re for Toby,’ says Valerie. ‘Treats for Toby.’
‘Oh.’ The child nods, but after a pause she says, ‘Please did you get me a treat please, Mummy?’
‘No darling. Not today.’
This morning, Valerie parked beside a lovely Mini – brand new, bright yellow, glossy and neat as a boiled sweet against the landscape of silver Land Rovers and smog-grey vans. She drove up beside it on purpose, aligning her car in one steady swoop. There was a box of lavender tissues on the dashboard, and, hanging from the mirror, a small teddy bear in a ballerina costume. The type of young woman who might drive about in that car would be efficient and fit, independent and busy. She would have hair sleeked back into a satiny ponytail. It would be nice to buy a car like that for Joanna someday.
‘What treats for Toby, Mummy?’
‘Treats, Joanna. Just treats, darling.’
‘For good Toby.’
The child loves Toby, a dense package of heat and breath, flat, wiry fur, and foxy snout. Sometimes she sits beside him on the floor, curves her arm over his stiff back and tilts her head towards him. ‘Toby,’ she sighs, patting him lightly with parted fingers. ‘Good Toby.’ His back is a dirty white with grey flecks and one big splotch of rust, but when Joanna talks about him she says she has an ‘orange dog called Toby’. His tail has been docked but a good three inches of it remain, so he sits all day wagging the sad little stump – too short for a tail and too long for the neat nubbin that tradition demands – waiting for Martin, his beloved master, to come home and pat him on the head. Martin will be at after-work drinks tonight, so Toby will sit and sit until it’s dark, banging that blunt stub on the tiled porch floor.
‘Why do they dock the tails?’ Valerie asked her husband once, ‘and why are they still born with tails, after all the breeding? Why do the tails remain?’ The reason mustn’t have been very satisfying, because Valerie can’t remember it now.
She never liked the dog. She should have said it when Martin first came home with the puppy – she should have made him get rid of it, but it was after her third miscarriage, and she was still cautious then, grateful and glad to be a wife, determined to rise to the role. Making a marriage work, her mother had told her, was largely about learning to like things that might at first seem tiresome. ‘And the secret,’ she said, ‘to a really happy marriage is to make him believe he is in control.’ When her mother said that she winked in that elegant, warming way she could. ‘But of course, darling, it’s you who is in control.’
Valerie buys Martin’s shirts for him, and his socks and his underpants even; she sends him out every day to work and then she buys the things she wants – that new coffee table; the wooden mini kitchen for Joanna. Joanna; she even named the child. Why, then, does it feel not at all like her mother’s victorious, conspiratorial wink?
She was right, though; Valerie has learned to like being a homemaker. There is a delicious guilt, now, in leafing through interior design catalogues, fantasizing about all the different ways she might redecorate the dining room. But Toby is nearly five, and she still doesn’t like him. As time goes on, he only smells worse; his lopsided gallop grows only more irksome. It’s a secret she hardly admits to herself: that she hates to be greeted by Toby, hates the pleasure Toby takes in Martin’s return or her daughter’s head-tilt, the way Toby laps up the meaningless words of praise, ‘Good Toby.’
In the evening while she waits for Martin, Valerie often allows herself a gin and tonic, and as she drinks, she listens to the steady tap of Toby’s half-tail on the tiles, faster and harder as the moment approaches, the sharp yelps of excitement when the car swings into view, the scuffle and bump as he leaps at the porch door because he can’t contain his excitement, and then his panting joy – pure dumb doggy joy – when Martin pats him on the head.
*
As an afterthought Valerie tilts her chin up and says, ‘I’ll get you a treat tomorrow, Joanna,’ but the child is asleep, her head flopped to the side, the soft peaked mouth drooling onto the seatbelt. Valerie almost doesn’t notice it – she is about to turn back but then she looks again and there it is – the familiar fleck perched insolently on the curve of her daughter’s cheek, and Valerie’s breath hooks high in her chest.
HROOOOO – it’s the four-by-four behind her, a man at the wheel wearing an ill-fitting suit jacket. He honks again, longer this time: HRNMOOOOO. The lights are green and she must go. Oh and God, what is she like? There are tears now; her eyes are watering, liquid seeping out like the ooze and split of an overripe fruit because her daughter, Valerie’s own and only child, is asleep with fleas hopping over her skin. She is a ridiculous woman and everyone knows it; a mush of a face pasted over with make-up, hobbling the streets with the hair of a pretty child and fleas in her expensive handbag; weeping at the wheel, holding up traffic. That hairdresser today – the way he ran his eyes over her; he knew she was a joke. And that stupid teenager, handing her the plastic bag, smiling and smiling at her like a hungry pup and laughing behind the smile. She can feel the creatures under her clothes, burying into her, creeping around in her nostrils. She will poison them, but will it even work? The bug bombs, the spray, the vacuuming. Or are fleas forever part of her now?
One of the women on the Internet said that she still had fleas after a thirty-year battle. ‘Will I ever feel clean again?’ she blogged.
*
Toby is already frantic at the porch door – he always knows when Joanna is coming home. Valerie opens the back door of the car very slowly and crouches, her stub heels sinking into the plush gravel. If she presses down on the flea, she will wake Joanna. She will have to pluck it off. She needs to be careful and deft. She brings her thumb and forefinger together on either side, but her nails are too long, the acrylic lacquer too thick. The flea drops immediately onto her daughter’s hand. Valerie lowers her head to assess the angle but – Ha! She feels the skin pleating around her lips as she huffs a quiet laugh, the tightness springs from her chest – it’s just a fleck of cut hair! She licks her finger, touches the speck, and lifts it gently away.
*
Valerie leaves her handbag in the back seat for now and brings in only the plastic bag with the things from the hardware shop. Toby knows better than to jump up on her nice skirt. While she moves to the kitchen, he orbits her like a satellite, leaping into the air, trembling with all the tempered aggression he has been bred for.
The kitchen is immaculate but for a mug in the sink with a ring of tea dried into the base. Dolores always does that – leaves the house spotless except for some tell-tale sign of her passing-through. Valerie has spoken to her about it several times.
With relish she removes her purchases from the hardware-shop bag and lays them out in a straight row. What pleases her is the variety of sizes and shapes – the tall can of spray, the tiny bug bomb, the pillow-shaped bag of dog treats.
Toby begins to nose at the bag and Valerie pulls it out of reach. Then she notices a few of the bone shapes at the bottom. The packet of treats must have split. Toby’s paws skitter on the floor as he resists the urge to jump. ‘Sit!’ says Valerie. The dog lowers his hind quarters, quivering in a half-squat.
Valerie slips her shoes off. The underfloor heating makes the soles of her feet tingle as she lowers the bag to Toby’s height. Toby hurls his weight into the suffocating plastic, nosing blindly around the bottom of the bag in a frenzy of snuffing and licking. He inhales nostrilfuls of the stuff, misses the treats and tries again, his tongue dark through the plastic, claws skating coolly on the hardwood floor.
Valerie’s mother – Mummy – must have her handbag by her at all times now. For hours sometimes, her fingers scurry and scrape at the lining, searching. She is getting worse. That’s what Valerie thought last time she visited – she is drawing further into that terrible mindscape of pretty napkins and perfume bottles, staring out at Valerie through shrinking, pinkening eyes.
The bag could smother Toby. Stupid creature. The sharpness of his claws makes her think of the hairdresser again, the metal in his flaccid brow, how it must have hurt and how the man wore his mutilation like victory. Valerie tries to pull it off him but he pushes in, all snorts and huffs, so that she has to put her palm on his spine and push down. ‘Sit, Toby.’ Toby can’t resist the order. His bony haunches collapse, the little peaks of his pelvic bones hiccupping with desire for his bag of doggie treats. He raises his rear again, and lowers, hovering, awaiting permission to move. Valerie puts a hand on the rough, oily sack of his neck. Inside the loose skin there is something craggy and solid – his voice box; his throat. As she peels the bag down off his nose, she notices, flapping at the edge of her vision, his docked tail – that mutilated knob of gristle, wagging and wagging and wagging for approval.
‘Why are you wagging, Toby? Stupid creature, why are you wagging?’
Poor dumb Toby; pleased with his treats. Toby, waiting for Martin’s pat, waiting for some orders to obey. Poor mutt. He thinks he’s pleased with his draughty porch, his Sunday walks, his treats and that amputated appendage.
‘What a life, Toby. What a joke.’
Valerie draws the bag tight around the dog’s head, stretching the plastic thin over the shape of his muzzle and his long skull. Watching the suck of the plastic catch and tug on his loose eyelids, she thinks of the day her ears were pierced. It was her mother who brought her. The jeweller used a red pen to make a dot on each lobe. The quick stamp of pain and the victory of no tears.
Face low with his now, Valerie can smell the oily sleek of Toby’s coat, the hot, healthy sweat, the sandy traces of excrement on his scraggle-bearded belly. She is on top of him now, her skirt hitched up and her legs pressing on Toby’s stringy muscles, the slosh of his stomach, the graceful chains of bones. Valerie retches loudly, for she can feel the greasy heat of him shifting on her groin. He bucks, but she has him, her knee jabbing into his neck, so he lowers his head silently. With both knees on Toby’s sharp shoulder blades, Valerie reaches for the handle of the built-in rubbish bin, pulls it outwards, and grabs the new sack that the cleaner has put in it – a heavy black one. She pushes one knee down on Toby’s head; his eye. Toby whimpers, that is all. Weakly, hopelessly, he shows her his teeth. Poor Toby. Stupid docile creature. With his head twisted on the ground, she opens the sack over his wincing face, scrunching it closed at his throat. Toby begins to growl now. He scrambles for some kind of leverage on the glossy floor. His hind legs kick and scratch. He jerks, and the force of it draws streaks of pain through her. She clasps and pulls until the bag is over the whole rat-like bulk of him. Because of the closing fan of her daughter’s cool, small hand in hers, the bones like quills and the flesh like fruit – because of Joanna she knows she can’t let go now, for she can see how the fleas would infest the delicate curls of her ears, how his filth would ruin her winter coat. In one snap he could remove the dimple-knuckled hands that like to pat his stinking hide, sever clean the soft bones and supple nails. Valerie heaves the bag up and is proud of her strength as she gets some swing on it and smacks it down, lifts it again as he whimpers and sags, and she heaves and smacks heaves and smacks and there are distant crackles like dry leaves being trodden down, then a fainter, daintier snap, but she will not stop until the bag is heavy and still and her shoulders ache and she knows it is done.
Slowly, painfully, she straightens her back and opens her jaw to the ceiling. The smell must have been here for some time – maybe even before the black bag, because the shit is on her arms in foamy globs and smeared with curious greasiness over her thighs, and she realizes that must be why she retched. She hears her own voice, soft and adult and reassuring. ‘There,’ it says. ‘Now. There.’
*
In the shower, Valerie makes the water as hot as she can bear. She uses soap, an exfoliator, then shower gel with a loofah.
She must visit her mother tomorrow. She would rather not. Last time she went, things were worse. Her mother’s hand scuttled like a sea crab across the floor of her empty handbag. ‘My powder,’ she said, ‘someone has taken my powder.’ She had that look Valerie had caught on her once before. It was when Valerie was a child – maybe eight or nine – at a dinner party. Her father’s work colleagues were there, and their wives, and some other important friends of her parents, and everything was going well. There was a fire crackling in the good room, and Valerie knew it was a success by the way the men nodded genially at each other, and the women admired each other’s dresses. It must have been the start of the evening, because Valerie had been asked to offer around the snacks and then to play the piano and everyone had clapped, but afterwards she found herself standing useless in the room of beautiful dresses and mahogany furniture, all the strangers looking at her back and her front, and smiling, and she had gone in search of her mother. She found her in the kitchen, arranging canapés on the oval silver platter that Valerie had always longed to touch. Her mother cut a beautiful shape – her head was bent, her neck arcing in that way that made Valerie think, always, of waterfalls. Suddenly she was a singular thing, where before she had been all of it – the food and the fire and the floor polish and the rhythm of the house. Valerie approached her quietly, needing to be near her, but finding no excuse for leaving the party. Her mother didn’t notice her, and when she raised her head, about to lift the plate, she was wearing a private face. Her lips had dropped to a lax pout, grave tightness at their edges and – the part that sent a ripple of terror through Valerie – her hooded eyes were round and bewildered beneath a twisting brow. When she saw Valerie watching she pulled her face into place – the dusky eye-sockets, the muscular cheeks. She pushed the tray into Valerie’s hand and told her to take it around the guests. All evening, Valerie felt the roundness of her mother’s eyes, the ugliness of her mouth.
That was the look her mother’s face had the last time Valerie saw it. Valerie made only a short visit, for she had Joanna with her. When she turned to leave, though, the old woman clutched Joanna weakly by the shoulders.
‘Vilie,’ she said, ‘my little Vilie Vie.’ It was a pet name she had used for Valerie when she was a child, but her voice was hateful and flat. ‘My silly little Vilie. You think I made the whole world, don’t you?’
The child stood very tense, her cheeks wrinkling, perhaps about to cry. Her grandmother shook a finger close to her face.
‘No, no, little Vilie. Don’t come to me with your tears, darling. I only tried to help you live in it, my darling. It was the other girls and boys made it, you silly goose you, and you thought it was me made it all.’
Valerie will not bring Joanna there again.
*
She hurries into her clothes – her jogging gear seems the only thing at this late stage in the evening.
Downstairs is fine except for the smell of bleach. The cleaner might be responsible for that, for all Martin knows. First she closes the French doors that look onto the night; the flat lawn and the discreet line of wheelie bins pushed against the wall. As she bolts the top latch she hears a gentle rustle beneath the silence outside, but she will not look at the big black bin. Her mind is playing tricks; she knows that. She hurries all the same, and is glad to twist the key and pull the heavy curtains shut.
Because of the shower, her body is hot to the night air that has gushed in noisily through all the open windows. She imagines steam lifting off the back of her neck as she moves from room to room, closing the big double doors of the breakfast lounge and the small window of the under-the-stairs lavatory. She imagines how her body must look to the fleas huddled in the chill upholstery – streaks of red and yellow, a whirl of nourishing blood moving in the dead atmosphere.
In the car, Joanna is still dribbling soundly onto the harness. She hasn’t had her dinner; there’s a risk she’ll wake hungry in the night, but Valerie will take the chance. Joanna begins to stir against her mother’s shoulder, but Valerie rubs her back and shushes her, ‘There now, there...’ Valerie puts her on the toilet upstairs and runs the tap to make her pee so that there are no accidents in the night. Then she lifts her into bed. She can sleep in her pinafore just this once. The cleaner has changed the sheets and Valerie wonders if Joanna is old enough to appreciate the pleasure of crisp cotton against her cheek. She pulls the duvet to her daughter’s chin and pries open the plaits, spreading the child’s bright hair over the pink Egyptian-cotton pillow case.
Joanna’s hair is the same colour as Valerie’s once was. On the hairdresser’s colour chart it is called Caramel 06.
Down in the kitchen Valerie puts a new black sack in the bin. The bin is clean, but something about it makes her think of maggots – the white chubbiness of them; the way they can materialize from any kind of filth; the way they are almost certainly there, at the bottom of the outside-bin, writhing blindly against the plastic; and the way they work diligently on things that are dead, curling out of eye-sockets and nostrils... She puts Dolores’s mug in the dishwasher and slices a wedge out of a lime, ignoring the drips of juice on the granite. She puts three ice cubes into a glass, squeezes the lime over the ice, and drops the wedge in on top. Now the gin, and now the spit of fresh tonic from a chilled can. Valerie has a silver stirrer that she uses to swirl the drink. She sits at the kitchen table. Now she can turn her attention to today’s shopping. She has brought it all in from the car, and she removes the cleanser and the free gift from the bag and sets them out before her. She will enjoy this as she sips the drink; she will enjoy unwrapping the generous sheets of crepe, swivelling the top of the cleanser until it pops up, ready to pump, and discovering the treats in the free gift bag. Her ankle twitches, and forgetting herself for a moment Valerie scratches along the bone. It is a comfort to know she has the bug bomb. She will wait until Monday to light it – Monday after Martin has left for work and before she takes Joanna to crèche.
She’s left the porch light on, and it is glowing now, an orange cube against the dark outside.