4
Human Mouths
“You know what I missed most?”
“No,” said Maureen. “I have no idea.”
“What I missed were mouths! People’s mouths!”
“You didn’t,” said Maureen. The sun was still low but strong, mists rising with perfect focus into the sharp air. Trees were penciled in silver and light flashed between the branches in spokes. Ahead, traffic carried diamond sparks while the land stretched out, glittering and frozen-white. Maureen flapped down the visor. All that sunlight was giving her a headache.
“Months and months of masks! You know, I just hated not seeing what people’s mouths were doing!”
“I know what you mean,” said a second voice. This one sounded older than the first and more solid. Maureen pictured a woman with gray hair and one of those linen shift dresses that hid things, whereas the voice of the first suggested someone who was altogether slimmer and more golden. She spoke in exclamation marks.
She was doing it again now. “People say you read a person’s face from the eyes! But that’s not true!”
“You’re right,” said Gray-hair. “I’ve never thought that way before, but now you say it, I know exactly what you mean.”
“It’s the mouth that tells you what a person is feeling!”
“Oh, you’re so right.”
“You know what I find? I just want to hug people! I see them going about their lives and I just want to hug them! Complete strangers!”
“Well, that’s it,” said Gray-hair. “If there’s one thing we learned from the pandemic it was that people are kind. The kindness of strangers. It’s what kept us going—”
Maureen reached for the radio. “Oh, what utter tripe,” she said. And she turned it off.
Maureen was not an easy person. She knew this. She was not an easy person to like and she wasn’t good at making friends. She had once joined a book club but she objected to the things they read, and gave up. There was always someone between her and everyone else and that was her son. This year he would have turned fifty.
After his suicide thirty years ago, her grief was so great she thought she would die of it. Really, she couldn’t understand how she was not dead. She wanted time to stop. Paralyze itself. But it didn’t. She had to get up every day and face his bedroom, the chair where he sat in the kitchen, his great big overcoat with no son inside it. Worse, she had to go out and face women with children, and young men who were high or drunk, and she had to walk past them without screaming. What had she been supposed to do with that unbearable burden? The incredible anger that was eating her alive? There had been a few cards of condolence—We are sorry for your loss; Our deepest sympathy—a picture of a white lily, the embossed message in flowery gold italics. Harold had found some comfort in those cards. He even put them on the mantelpiece so that Maureen could find comfort in them too. But she stared at the words and despised them. Nothing about them made sense, in the same way that going to sleep made no sense either. And the more she looked at them, the more she felt accused—as if, without anyone saying it, they believed she must be to blame. In the end, she cut the cards into a hundred jagged shreds, and when that did not make her feel any better, she took the same scissors to her lovely long brown hair and cut that off too. Oh, she felt mad. Absolutely hopping. She didn’t even recognize who she was. She was just this new person, this raging sonless mother, the shadowy figure you glimpse behind a pair of net curtains. The future she’d meant to have was gone. She had no idea how she was living this kind of ghost life instead, in which she could do nothing except watch the person who had taken her place and hate her. All she wanted was her son. All she wanted was to see David.
“So if you think you want my husband, take him,” she had said to Queenie, when she paid a visit a few weeks after the funeral. It was the first and only time they met, though Harold used to tell stories about her at work—they seemed to share the same sense of humor—and Maureen could smell her in the car sometimes, a mix of violet sweets and cheap scent. Queenie had found Maureen hanging up the washing in the garden. She had come up the path holding out a bunch of flowers that Maureen put straight in the laundry basket. “But if you don’t want him,” she’d told her, “clear out of our lives.” They’d stood, the two of them, either side of the washing line while Maureen continued to peg out clean T-shirts that her son would never wear, and Queenie wiped away tears. “Haven’t you gone yet?” Maureen shouted.
In her grief, she had said the worst things. Queenie was Harold’s friend. She would never have taken him. But Maureen no longer cared in those days whom she upset. She wanted to upset them. She wanted to drive them all as far away from her as possible, to the other end of the earth, if she could. Even Harold. “Call yourself a man?” she’d railed. “Call yourself a father? It was your fault! I don’t even want to look at you!”
It was only after Harold’s walk that Maureen had finally been able to apologize. “Forgive me,” she had said, and he had taken her hand and clutched it for a while as if he had never held anything quite so precious and said, “Oh, Maw, you were never to blame. Forgive me, too.” She thought they might dare to have conversations about David and all the things they had got wrong. All the lurking, shadowy things she wanted to say and for which she could not find the words. But Harold was so exhausted in the weeks and months after his journey that those conversations never even started. She got the impression he had found some kind of release, an absolution of a kind, while she—who had gone nowhere—was left high and dry. She took up gardening again, though, because he had once loved to see her in the garden, almost as much as he’d loved her long brown hair. She redecorated the sitting room with patterned wallpaper and had the lino on the kitchen floor replaced. She chose a new color for the bedroom and made curtains to match the counterpane. She even cleared David’s room, wrapping his things up, one by one, and placing them in a box for the loft. But she still kept a space for her son inside her. It was where he came from, after all. That small creel inside her.
Weston-super-Mare. Clevedon. The early morning was a tender blue, fading to milk on the horizon, and the frozen land rose and sloped away with white glowing spills. Gulls reeled, yawing and screeching, so many they were a broken crisscrossing of lines, while above them vapor trails tacked a path across the sky. Bundles of mistletoe hung in a line of trees, like oversized handbags. Approaching Bristol, she reached the stretch of motorway that was raised on columns, carrying it above woodland and the bowl of a valley. She passed over the River Avon, and saw light glinting on all the hundreds of cars parked at the compound of Portbury Dock, while far out there were the tall cranes and liners at the Severn Estuary. Maureen stopped at another service station, but only for water and the washroom. It wasn’t as clean as it should have been and she had to put paper on the toilet seat. She washed her hands carefully.
A woman in a coat with big flowers all over it was crying and saying, “I don’t know why I bother. I don’t know why I keep going back,” and her friend was holding her and saying, “The trouble is you’re a saint. You’re your own worst enemy,” while she pulled paper towels out of a dispenser and passed them to her friend. Maureen made a deal of stepping round them because they were also in the way of the hand-dryer.
“Your mother is a saint.” It was something her father had often said. “She is a saint for putting up with me.” And Maureen would wish he wouldn’t because it made him sound so old and given-up.
The service station was busy. There were families everywhere, with children running all over the place. Twice she had to stop in her tracks. A man in a T-shirt with the words Dining Area Host was picking up trays of leftovers, one at a time, and trudging with them toward a screened-off section in the middle. Maureen didn’t know when that term had come about. She didn’t know why it was a better word than “cleaner.” She passed a Lucky Coin game arcade and a Krispy Kreme doughnut display beside a row of those large gray plastic armchairs that gave a massage if you put money in the slot. An old man was asleep with his feet curled up and his face mask over his eyes. Maureen had hated the first time she wore a mask but that was only because it was like being squashed. She had grown used to it very quickly. And she liked the anonymity. The polite keeping of one’s distance. After all, she’d never been what you would call a hugger. She didn’t even like people calling her by her first name—that was another thing she’d disliked about the book group, apart from the trash they chose to read. It was all Deborah this and Alice that. So if Maureen had to wear a mask for the rest of her life, she could think of worse things.
“Could I interest you in a book?” said a woman, arranging a table of secondhand paperbacks in aid of Help for Heroes.
“Not my thing,” said Maureen. She didn’t even stop to browse. You never knew what you might find. It was enough to bring a fluttering feeling to her chest.
In the shop, she went in search of a bottle of water. Blue feet-shaped arrows directed customers in single file, which Maureen followed, though the couple coming toward her in matching animal-print fleeces did not, so she had to step aside for them and they didn’t even say thank you. “Well, thank you,” she said, under her breath.
There were more notices about social distancing and hand sanitizer stations, with spots of gel on the floor. But there was still nothing to make her want to go round embracing complete strangers, or even understand humankind any better. She paid for her water and a crossword magazine and no one asked her where she was going or if she was making good time.
The cashier had beautiful long fingers with green nail varnish, and a name badge that said “Moonbeam.”
“Can I interest you in the special offer?”
“That depends,” Maureen said. “What is it?”
“Three air fresheners for your car for the price of two.” Moonbeam pointed at a display of them.
“But I only have one car,” said Maureen. The air fresheners confused her. They were a selection of neon-colored tropical fruits, like pineapples and melons, and all of them with sunglasses on.
“It’s still a bargain. If you lose one of your fresheners, you’ll have another two.”
“But if I have three fresheners, it means I’m waiting to lose one. And if I’m waiting to lose one, I will.”
“It’s up to you. I’m just telling you the special offer. You don’t have to buy it.” Maureen had barely turned before the cashier looked at the four young women behind her in the queue and gave a rolling of the eyes.
Harold had met kindness on his journey. Or he had brought out love in other people. But it was not like that for Maureen. “A difficult child,” she heard her mother saying. Now she thought of them, the words seemed so clear, and she could see her mother in her patent shoes with three straps, which she was always polishing because of the mud outside. She could remember the smell of her mother too, always the same, always redolent of everything most longed for and most elusive. Her mother had been beautiful once and had airs. She came from good stock, was what she liked to say, but her husband had poor health and little money and they had been forced to retreat to the countryside. Her mother hated everything about the countryside. The smells, the dirt, the isolation. It mortified her that they couldn’t afford extra help. “You think a house cleans itself?” she would say, in her sliced accent, holding a mop as if her dislike for it was personal, and Maureen would watch her and vow, I will never be that person. She was her father’s child.
Yet these days she experienced a faint shock when she met her reflection in the mirror. Despite her short white hair, Maureen had her mother’s mouth and chin. Even her way of holding her head high. You think you will be different but the blueprint is still there: Maureen looked into the mirror and saw the ghost of her mother, staring back.
Mid-morning. Signs for Stroud, then Gloucester, Cheltenham. The Cotswold hills were a dust-blue shoulder to her right. She passed a broken-down HGV, its cab jackknifed forward like a broken neck. Already the day was losing its sharpness. Vast scarps of cloud lay ahead, while the air felt full and there were still dark borders of ice on the hard shoulder where the sun had not reached. Fog was coming. A coach swung in front of her, St. George flags at the windows and football fans waving. She overtook a convoy of trucks carrying ready-made prefab homes, each with a set of net curtains at the window, and a woman whose car was packed to the roof with bin bags. By the time she reached the M42, the fog was so thick she could see it flickering toward the windscreen, like grains of sugar. The only color now was the smudgy red of taillights ahead; wind-crippled trees at the roadside appeared to grow out of water. The world had become a strange emptiness of road and mudbanks, where things had no connection, dissolving then solidifying, and she thought that this was how it was with her mind. That it was a series of puzzle pieces that could never be put together.
Warning. M42 Closed. Maureen was pulled back to the present. A sign flashed above the motorway, the orange letters spilling into fog. Queues Ahead. She drove another few miles and tried to focus on the road but it was like driving into nothing and she kept losing concentration. She was far away again, thinking of David and his tablet at the crematorium that she visited every month and polished with a cloth, and the little green stones around it that she tidied with a hand-sized rake, even though other people did not tidy their little stones, so that they fell into David’s and then she had to tidy those too. She was thinking of the large woman with loud makeup whom she had approached recently, because the stones on her plot were all over the place, and the urn was rusted over, and how Maureen had said it surely wasn’t too much to ask her to look after it properly. The woman had told Maureen to mind her own bloody business, and in her panic, Maureen had replied that if the woman ate a better diet, she might not be so unhappy. She had actually said that. Those very words had come out of her mouth. One moment, they were safe in her head, offensive, yes, but somehow not seeming that way—because this woman was big, no question, she had many soft chins, all coated in that terrible makeup—and the next, there the words were, slap in the air, like great big posters. Too late, Maureen realized her mistake. The woman had come up close, so close Maureen could see the clogged orange pores of her skin and the creases in her purple eye shadow, and shouted that Maureen was a fucking insane bitch. So now, when she went to the crematorium, she wasn’t able to think only of David, she was also thinking of that large woman with the makeup, and hoping she would not be there, and the whole place was tainted in her mind, in the same way the bookshop on the high street had become tainted a few years ago. Carry on like this, there wouldn’t be anywhere left.
Maureen hummed to stop thinking. This was the problem with the car. Too much time trapped in her head. Better to be doing things with her hands. She hoped Harold was managing with the dishwasher. She hoped he could find the coffee and the cups. She should have left those Post-it notes in the kitchen, after all. She would come off at the next service station and phone home. Besides, she needed the washroom again. She had only to think about it and she needed it. In fact the more she thought about it, the worse it got. A kind of burning low down, a tight heat. She needed to stop thinking about it. She thought about Harold instead and the skin on his back that was still as smooth as ever, and how the first time she had seen him naked, she had been afraid even to touch him because she wanted him so much. She had never seen her parents so much as kiss. The road curved to the left and Maureen kept driving in a trance of red taillights, her mind with Harold, until it dawned on her that something was wrong and the thing that was wrong was that those lights ahead were not moving, while she was. She was moving toward them and they were stationary.
Maureen pressed the brake. Nothing happened. She cramped it harder but missed and got the footwell. The car kept traveling forward. She jammed her foot down but too fast because this time the car seemed to lose traction and instead of stopping made a swerve to the left, and then, despite everything she did, she was heading very slowly but at the wrong angle toward the hard shoulder, and for a matter of moments she could no longer remember how to stop a car, or even which pedal was which, she knew only that it was out of control, that she was sliding toward the barrier and there were other cars all around her, none of them moving, and beyond that, a wall of fog, and all her turning of the wheel and pumping of the brake made no difference.
There was a strange moment of stillness, an almost welcome realization that what she was trying to prevent was already happening and there was nothing she could do any more except sit very still and see what happened next. She badly needed the washroom.