Accidents in the Home (19 page)

From Heathrow he telephoned his mother. Angie answered the phone.

—Could I speak to Naomi, please? he asked.

Her voice was gruff and terse. Who wants Naomi?

Toby cleared his throat. He was embarrassed to say; he and Angie hadn't parted on good terms when he left to go on his travels three months before.

—Naomi doesn't live here. Naomi's over. Naomi's dead, said the voice, not bothering to wait for him to go on.

Then she hung up.

Toby frowned. He gave up the phone booth to a girl backpacker waiting behind him, went to an empty seat, and carefully counted over the English notes in his purse. There was not enough for a coach ticket home; he would have to hitch. He did not really believe that his mother was dead; if she had been dead, her friend would have listed those three things differently, surely: death would have come first. If someone was dead, you did not begin with other things about them. But nonetheless, an anxiety about his mother took up its old place in his chest like a little hard ugly manikin.

After waiting for about an hour at an intersection, he got a lift with an all-night lorry driver going west who took him to the nearest motorway junction to home; then he had to walk for three or four miles through the sleeping outskirts of the city, hoping he'd see a bus or a taxi or a phone booth. When he did find a phone he discovered that all the coins left in his pocket were rupees. He decided to go to the house in Benteaston where his half sister Tamsin lived with her mother; his father's house was another long walk across the city in Kingsmile. Benteaston was on his way in from the motorway, Victorian and Edwardian terraces crawling up and down the hills; always respectable, now even desirable and professional.

He didn't want to wake Tamsin's mother by ringing the doorbell, so he left his pack in the front porch, went around to the back lane, and climbed the wall into the garden. Tamsin's room was upstairs at the back. He couldn't find any gravel—it was very dark, it was three in the morning—so he had to scoop up a handful of earth to throw at her window; it hit the glass with a soft spattering thud. On the third attempt Tamsin came to the window in pale pajamas and opened it.

—Fuck off! she hissed loudly into the garden. Whoever you are, fuck off, you stupid bastard, or I'll come down there and blow your fucking head off with my shotgun.

—Tamsin! It's me! It's Toby! I didn't want to wake your mum, but I've just come home.

—Toby! You dickhead, you complete dickhead. Why didn't you phone like normal people do? Wait there!

Lights went on: a few moments later she was opening the back door for him, then he was inside the kitchen, blinking and grinning while Tamsin kissed and hugged him, not quite able to believe it was possible to wander so very far away on such a long leash and then wind it in again and find oneself back here in the exact same small familiar place, the neat modern kitchen with matching oven mitts and tea towels, fresh herbs growing on the windowsill. And he had managed somehow to forget while he was away Tamsin's precise aura like a groomed fastidious cat; even woken in the middle of the night in pajamas she was neat and self-possessed and her straight dark shoulder-length hair looked brushed. She had long dark eyes full of cat scorn, too, and eyebrows that met in the middle: an Aztec, their father called her.

—Have you really got a shotgun?

—Oh, yes, Toby, really, I keep a shotgun under my bed; didn't you notice all the holes in the wall where I've been practicing? Idiot; what do you think? And I suppose you've had all your luggage stolen, have you? That would be so typical!

—It's on the front porch.

—So go and get it! And you probably want me to make you a cup of tea. Although I ought to warn you before you touch meat or drink in this house that it seems to have become some weird sort of women's refuge. Seething with evening primrose oil and female angst and synchronized menstruation and all that. We have refugees. First Naomi moved in with us, then Clare.

—So Naomi's here! And she's all right?

There was a sulky downturn of the mouth whose edge was as sharp as if it was outlined in pencil. All right?

—I mean, alive. And well. Reasonably well.

—Oh, we're all all right, if that's what you mean by all right.

—Good. That's good.

—As far as it goes.

Marian, Tamsin's mother—tall and heavy and gray-haired, belted into an old-fashioned man's dressing gown—came downstairs, woken up by the noise; then Clare, Tamsin's older sister—pale and serious, with her hair in a plait. They stood sleepily around him in the kitchen in their nightclothes with puffy faces and frizzy hair, giving off the warmth and the yeasty smell of bed, exclaiming and smiling and touching and kissing him. Marian put the kettle on.

—Oh, Toby dear, she said, your mother will be so delighted to have you back.

—Shall I wake her? asked Clare.

—I don't know. Maybe. Has Tamsin told you, Toby, that Naomi's staying with us for a while?

—I did phone the Leigh Mills number and spoke to Angie, but she was pretty weird.

—You didn't mention that your mother might be here?

—I didn't say anything. She hung up.

—It's better if she doesn't know Naomi's here for the moment.

—Shouldn't I wake her? said Clare. Wouldn't she want us to?

Marian shrugged. You can try. I'll make a pot of tea.

Toby followed Clare up the stairs. Halfway up, on the little landing, she turned and clutched his arms and looked desperately into his face.

—Oh, Toby, my life's such a mess—has Tamsin told you? Bram and I have separated, and I'm living here, and I go there to look after the children on weekends. I haven't managed to sort out anything else yet, because I'm so miserable, everything's more hideous and horrible than I ever could have imagined.

—Separated? Toby felt himself blushing; he wasn't used to Clare's taking much notice of him, she could be condescending and overbearing. I don't believe it.

Her face distorted in a silent ugly spasm, her nose and eyes reddened, and her cheeks were wet with tears.

—I know. But I can't talk about it now.

—But you and Bram—

—No, she said, wiping her face on her sleeve resolutely and continuing up the stairs. Not now. We've got to go and wake up Naomi.

He stepped through the spare-room door into the thick familiar soup of his mother's smells: incense and aromatherapy oils and sweat and drink, the warning smell of drink, rich as Christmas pudding. Naomi was snoring; she was a mound under a duvet with only a swirl of black hair showing on the pillow: when Clare switched on a bedside lamp whose shade was swathed in a purple silk shawl, the mound snorted and protested and a hand tweaked the duvet protectively over her oblivion. He would have known it was his mother's room even if she hadn't been in it because every surface of Marian's sensible spare-room furniture was laden with Naomi's intimate clutter: bangles and rainbow candles and perfume bottles and scarves; a stone painted with Inuit designs; a Victorian coffee cup with a gold rim and no saucer; paperback books with pages furry and splayed and turned down.

Clare sat down on the bed beside the mound.

—Naomi, she called. Wake up! Look who's here, who's come back. It's Toby!

The mound didn't stir. Clare looked at Toby. She's been drinking a lot, she whispered. There've been terrible things with Angie. It's like the other times. She picked up an empty wine bottle from the floor. She brought this up to bed half full. And she'd already had most of another bottle.

Toby nodded. He crouched down beside where the mound's head must be.

—Mum? Are you in there? It's me.

—Toby? There was a disturbance under the duvet, and then came the thickened false wooden voice that always seemed to him to be his mother's counterpart to the ugly little anxiety manikin that sat in his chest. What are you doing here?

—I've come home.

—Where've you been?

—Oh, you know, all round India, and then Nepal. I flew from Nepal the day before yesterday.

Naomi pushed back the duvet and then heaved herself around and up onto her pillows, frowning in concentration as if she were balancing something heavy and slippery that rolled inside her. Her makeup was smeared under her eyes like ashes; her skin had erupted across her cheekbones in a brick-colored rash. She had gone to sleep in dangling earrings, one of which was twisted back to front, and a black satiny slip whose border cut like a band across one bulging breast exposed almost to the dark nipple. Clare tugged up her petticoat strap until she was decent.

—Did they tell you I wasn't feeling too good tonight? Do you know about what happened with Angie?

—They told me something.

—I fouled up again.

—It wasn't you, Mum.

—Marian's so kind. I'm such a nuisance.

—That's not what anybody thinks, said Clare.

—I've let everybody down again. I've let Toby down. I didn't want him to come back to this.

When his mother had been drinking, Toby always felt as if he was in contact with a simulacrum, a mere unsatisfactory representative of her real self. She didn't look quite like the real Naomi; she sounded louder, as though her volume control knob had been cavalierly twisted up at some interior party. Her thoughts were pretend thoughts, her emotions were ones an impersonator might have guessed at and acted. This simulacrum must be soothed and propitiated but at the same time ruthlessly shut out; he was expert at this deception.

—Now I'm home, he said, everything'll be fine. I'll be able to look after you.

—Clare's got troubles of her own, she said. She doesn't want to be bothered with me.

—Don't be silly, said Clare. We're both in the same boat.

—I've got a good son, haven't I? He's a good boy. I must have done something right.

—You haven't done anything wrong, said Toby.

*   *   *

M
ARIAN IN
dressing gown and slippers made up a bed for Toby in the dawn light.

Clare had offered to sleep on the mattress in Tamsin's room so that Toby could have the sofa bed in the study.

—No fear, said Tamsin. I'd never get any sleep, holed up next to the fountain of eternal sorrow. Toby can come in with me. It'll be like the old days.

—I suppose it's all right, said Marian.

—Oh, for God's sake, Mum.

When Tamsin and Toby were little they had shared a bedroom for several years in the house in Kingsmile where their father lived then with Naomi. (Tamsin and Clare used to go to Marian's on weekends.) Their room was a wild place at the very top of the four-story skinny Georgian house: painted white, bare of furniture except their mattresses on the floor, out of earshot of the adult life that washed around in the rooms downstairs. They developed an elaborate ritual of games and magics and taboos that no one outside the room knew much about: invisible uncrossable lines on the floor divided up their space, in the ceiling that came down at odd angles under the roof there were lucky cracks to touch, there was a cursed corner with a dirty broken baseboard they must not even look into. Whatever lived and groaned up behind the ornate cast-iron flap that closed off the chimney from the little empty fireplace must be propitiated with offerings stolen from downstairs: currants, dry pasta, lentils, salt. Certain games must be played at certain times of day or year or on particular occasions. They had a torture game where one of them thought of a secret and the other one had to try and persuade the first one to tell, by rubbing strong toothpaste onto the tongue, say, or giving Chinese burns, or eating chocolate without offering any. Clare was sometimes allowed to join in this one but she went too fast and hurt too much too quickly, not appreciating the point of the long-drawn-out exquisite contest of endurance. Some games were self-consciously childlike, too young for them, commemorative of previous phases of their lives: a game of trains, for instance, played ritually on the day that guests departed.

There was a game for when there was a grown-up dinner party on downstairs. Tamsin and Toby would get into the same bed, sitting up with the sheet draped over their heads like a tent, and in a mixture of telling and acting and urgent sotto voce planning, they went through adventures featuring Han Solo and Luke Sky-walker against the evil amphibian Mr. Beale, who led an army of seals. Tamsin and Toby were not Han Solo or Luke Skywalker themselves, they were only involved with them; Tamsin tended and consoled them when they were injured, crooning to them and stroking their invisible faces. If the party downstairs was a full-blown party, things got crazy; Clare joined in too and any other children who were staying over. They would barricade off the top floor with mattresses across the top of the stairs; they sent foraging parties down to spy on the grown-ups, to return with reports on who was drunk, who was dancing, who was kissing, who was quarreling or crying. They brought back stolen food and drink. They kept guard, with a system of Red Alerts to warn of any adults advancing too far up the stairs. The sense of immediate infinite possibilities snatched the breath out of their lungs, infected them with a heady energy they didn't know what to do with, so they screamed and ran about and threw themselves onto the beds and on top of each other, panting; they stole makeup and clothes and dressed up, boys and girls, and danced and sang in lurid mockery of their parents down below, waggling their hips and rolling their eyes. Children from nice quiet homes whose parents didn't let them do things went craziest. It was they who dragged mattresses, who drank vodka. Clare and Tamsin and Toby would watch them (there was no need to encourage them) with a certain satisfaction, as if this wildness that lay just under the calm surface of life was something all children ought to be initiated into, for their own safety.

*   *   *

IN HIS DREAMS
he was afloat on sheets, laundered and ironed into neat rectangles, wafting their perfume of washing powder. They flew out under him as they had flown out across the room under Marian's proficient hands, like big birds balanced on currents of air.