In the Kitchen (23 page)

Nana swallowed her biscuit and dabbed her eye with a piece of kitchen roll.

'Cradle to grave, me and Gladys. There's not many friends as can say that.

Come over closer, Gabriel, my eyes are not what they were. Gone and left me, she has. Mind you, I'll not be long behind.'

Gabe patted Nana's hand. Ted rolled his eyes and said, 'Have another biscuit.

Go on.'

'Well,' said Nana, seized by a sudden coquettishness, 'there's nobody watching my figure now.' She had, over the last decade, grown a barrel chest on which her chin could comfortably rest for a snooze. Gabriel handed her the biscuit tin.

The clock said quarter past four. Maybe it had stopped. Had it really been only twenty minutes since he'd arrived?

'Mahogany,' said Nana. 'With brass handles. What do you make of that?'

'Nana,' said Ted. 'Come on, now.'

'Fancy,' said Nana. 'What a waste.'

Gabriel looked at Ted, who shrugged. 'Coffin,' he explained. He stood up and switched on the lamps. Gabe looked at the way his trousers hung from the waist, nothing filling the seat.

'Your programme's on soon, Nana. I'll pull the curtains to.'

They had the gas fire on and the television with the sound turned low while they waited for the programme to begin. Nana closed her eyes. Gabriel struggled to keep his open. The hiss of the fire, the babble of voices, the blanketing heat. This house was never the way he remembered it. The ceilings were too low. Everything had a cardboard feel. When they'd moved in it felt like a palace; it felt like an overgrown Wendy house now. All the colours were faded, the sofa covers had slipped from maroon to dusty brown, the walls from cheery yellow to a life-sapping shade of cream. The whole place was heartbreakingly tidy, as if nothing much ever happened, which probably it never did.

Gabriel tried to formulate a question for Ted. He wanted to ask in a way that would get Ted to open up. 'How are you?' was all he could think of.

'Can't complain.' He was thinner, definitely thinner, but he was strong and straight. His face perhaps was pulled a little tighter across the steely cut of his nose, and at the edges of his no-nonsense mouth, but you could still read his character there.

Shaking off his irritation, Gabriel tried again. 'You've lost some weight.'

'Aye,' said Ted. 'Part of the process.' His shirt, Gabe noticed, was frayed at the collar and there was a stain on his sweater sleeve.

'Dad,' said Gabe.

Ted shuffled his feet. 'I'm not doing so bad. Bit tired. It don't take you too bad 'til the end.'

'What did the doctor ...'

'Nana's took it hard. When she remembers, that is.'

'Her memory's going?' Gabriel looked at Nana, a strand of drool on her lip, the sheet of kitchen roll tucked into the neck of her blouse. Her hair, short grey wisps, stood up on either side of her head, making her look vaguely shocked or lightly electrocuted, sprawled across stool and chair.

'Comes and goes,' said Ted. 'Still finding new ways to drive me mad. How's work?'

'I'll be leaving soon,' said Gabe. He leaned forward. 'Dad, I'm setting up my own place.'

Ted snorted. 'Leaving? You've only been there five minutes.'

'Five months. Six. But it was never meant to be for long.' Gabriel sighed.

There was no point arguing now.

'Your own place,' said Ted. 'Good for you. That's grand, it really is.'

'Have I missed it?' said Nana, waking. 'Turn it up. Ted, are you having a sherry? Because I'll have a small one myself.' She slid her feet off the stool and levered herself a little more upright.

'That's right, Phyllis,' said Ted, winking at Gabriel, 'I've been at your sherry again.'

Gabe got up and loaded the tea tray. 'I'll get it, Nana. Dad, any beers in the fridge?'

When he returned they were watching the television, one of those chat-cum-freak shows, where the host talked about 'healing' and hoped one of the guests would throw a punch.

'Can't cope,' said Ted, 'that's all you hear on this show. He can't cope. She can't cope.'

'Shush,' said Nana. 'Six kids, this one's got by, what is it, seven different fathers? In't it shocking, Gabe?'

Gabriel laughed as he poured her sherry. 'I demand a recount,' he said.

Ted smoothed the arms of his chair, that old familiar gesture. 'In my day,' he said, 'that's what we did. We coped. That's what we had to do.'

Nana, on her third sherry, grew sufficiently animated to sit up straight in her chair. The loose, soft skin of her face trembled with words that sought to escape while her mouth prepared itself slowly for action, warming up with a few mouldings and partings of the lips. Gabe studied her closely, trying to remember how she used to look when he was a boy. The years, it seemed, had robbed her of the singular, all her features melting into a generality of old age. No matter how hard he looked, he couldn't really see her, just the lines and folds and wrinkles, a second caul at the other end of life.

'Listen to this, Gabriel,' she said finally. 'It's Edith who told me and you can't say truer than that. Happened to a neighbour of hers. Well, she lives down the beaches, doesn't she, been there since ... well, you're going back a long time now.' Nana hesitated, floundering for a moment. She plunged on.

'Anyway, this chap's sat there of an evening, in bed, minding his own, when he hears a noise. From up there,' said Nana, pointing to the ceiling with a finger turned querulous by arthritis and an incipient sense of outrage.

'That's queer, he thinks. Sounds like there's a rat got into the attic. A big one.'

'Nana,' said Gabriel, beginning to suspect where this might be going.

'Prince Street, it was,' said Nana, dabbing her left eye, which appeared to suffer some continual low-grade seepage. 'Down the beaches, you remember, Gabe.'

'The beaches, course I do, Nana. Where I learned to ride my bike, remember.

Only the other side of the main road from Astley Street. But we're talking about thirty-odd years ago now, aren't we, Nana? We're not talking about today.' 'The beaches' was a stretch of concrete with a mouldering fountain and a bench that lay between the terraces of the old town, where a German bomb had cracked the rows apart. Gabe, in the days when the earth's circumference could be described in the swing of a conker, had spent many an hour there, perfecting the art of mooching about.

Nana leaned so far forward Gabe feared she would topple out of the chair.

'That's queer, he thinks, this chap.' Nana's features might have blurred with time, but her voice was distinct enough. It moved up a register and she began to enunciate more carefully, the better to articulate her disgust. 'So he goes to fetch a stepladder and he climbs up to the loft. He gets the trapdoor open and he's got a torch with him, of course ...'

Gabriel knew what she was going to say and fervently wished that she wouldn't.

He looked at Ted, sitting with his hands on the sides of the chair, the snub of the left little finger, its final joint missing, pressing into the fabric.

'Well, you'll never guess what he saw,' said Nana. She clamped her lips together.

'Oh,' said Gabe, 'I think I will.'

'The whole attic,' said Nana, in an ecstasy of indignation, 'was full of Pakistans.'

'No, Nana, not this ...'

'Yes, oh, yes. Got their mattresses and whatnot, and there they all are in a line, sleeping between their shifts, and there's others what come and take their places when this lot go off t' the mill. The chap got right to the bottom of it, you see, and you know the way all the attics in them terraces are joined, well there's Pakistans all down the row, right to the end of the street. Bartlett Street, it was. June told me all about it because this chap's a neighbour and she said to me, Phyllis, what is the world coming to, and I said, June, I just don't know any more, I really don't.'

Nana sat back and dabbed at her eye.

'Nana,' said Gabriel, 'have you heard the phrase "urban myth"?' He must have been nine or ten years old when he first heard that story.

'Best leave it, Gabe,' said Ted. 'Clock's broken, if you know what I mean. A bit confused, now and then.'

'Who's confused?' snapped Nana. 'And I'm not deaf, neither.'

Ted smiled. 'Still the full shilling, that's right. What was it Albert used to say? If our Phyllis was any sharper she'd cut herself. Isn't that the truth?'

Nana's mouth puckered and twitched. 'Eee,' she said in a long, whistling sigh.

'It's been a good life. That much I can say. When I married Bert, seventeen years old, that's all, and he was twenty-one, and we'd never a cross word,'

said Nana, her voice and face aflutter with emotion. 'Not in all those years.'

'Never a cross word,' said Ted. 'That's right, Phyllis, that's right.'

Gabriel stood in the kitchen peeling potatoes. Nana wanted egg and chips for her tea. The kitchen, at the back of the house, used to look out to the field but now looked over a housing estate, in which all the houses were 'individual' (to increase the price at which they could be marketed) but basically identical, sharing an architectural style – a Tudorbethan mishmash of stone cladding and fake timbering – that found favour with the upwardly mobile.

Gabriel drew the curtains. The peeler was blunt. He put it down and took a kitchen knife from the drawer. It was blunt as well. He ran his hand along the spice rack that was fixed to the wall, a rickety affair that trapped tall narrow bottles of ancient cumin, paprika and chilli. Mum had bought it long ago. Gabe doubted it had ever been used. The tiles by the sink needed regrouting, all the cupboard handles seemed to be loose, and only two of the spotlights were working, two stabs of unforgiving light over the general shabbiness of it all. But the kitchen was spick and span. The surfaces wiped clean. Why did the walls close in so quickly? How had the place shrunk so?

He set the chip pan on the stove and lit the ring. He sliced the potatoes, dried them on kitchen towel and loaded them into the basket. If Charlie were here she'd stave it off, this sense of decay, just with a flick of her hair.

Her perfume would mask the smell of death. He needed her; he'd thought it before and he knew it now. The test chip sizzled and somersaulted in the hot fat. Gabriel lowered the basket in. What he had to do was tell Charlie about Lena. Not that he'd slept with her, of course, but the rest of it. The sex had to stop. Now that he knew. He had to protect her now.

It would be a little awkward to tell Charl
ie.
I've got this girl staying at my flat. But he could fudge it, blur the timeline and once Charlie knew what Lena had been through that would be all she was interested in.

'My brother is in London,' Lena had said. 'Please. Help me find.'

'Of course I'll do that for you.' Why did he promise that? Where would he begin?

This morning she had put on his shirt to cover herself and left him on the sofa while she curled up on a corner of the chaise longue. She told him all that had happened without looking at him, her unseeing gaze directed to the centre of the room. The gypsy woman in Mazyr, she said, that bitch. Probably she was still doing it, may she burn in hell. Boris was the man, yes, the tall and dark and handsome man, with the mark here, on his neck. He came for her, just like the tea leaves said, and he was the one. She was supposed to go to Italy, to look after old people, that's where he said he was taking her, but he took her to a different place. It was a new life, OK, the gypsy bitch did not lie about that.

He watched her knot her fingers together. Her knees were gathered to her chest. When he only imagined her she seemed so real. But when he was with her she seemed to fade. She was so pale it compromised her existence, as if you could put out a hand and sweep it clean through her body, as if she were merely a trick of the light.

Lena, thought Gabriel, the word running through him like a shiver.

'Getting on all right?' Ted was at his shoulder.

'Just taking these out for a bit, then I'll put them back in to crisp up.'

'I'll set the table,' said Ted, opening the cutlery drawer. His clothes, dark brown trousers, beige V-neck and checked shirt, were the same off-duty uniform that he'd worn for as long as Gabe could remember, a kind of standing protest against change that had continued down the decades.

Gabe found a frying pan. He took the eggs from the fridge. He wished he could be himself with his father, talk to him naturally, the two of them shooting the breeze. Whatever had gone before, though they had never been close, though the common ground on which they could stand was small and parched, he wanted to speak to his father before the time was gone. He wanted to set aside the irritation that arose so easily in Ted's presence, but it seemed to exist in a part of him that was impossible to reach, like an itch in a phantom limb.

'Nana and Granddad never had a cross word,' said Gabe. 'Is that right?'

'That's right,' said Ted. 'And I'm the Queen of Sheba. No, they got on all right but they'd their share of troubles, just like the next couple.'

'Dad, do you think Nana's going a bit, you know ...'

'Oh aye, she is a bit. Tells anyone who'll listen her Albert was an accountant. Well, you know, he did a bit of bookkeeping, and he wore a tie to work.' Ted laughed and then started coughing. He stood breathless for a while and Gabriel saw that he was leaning on the chairback for support. 'Mind you,'

he went on, 'she said that before. And she believes it now, of course.'

'I used to think Nana was posh,' said Gabe. 'She had me fooled.'

'Had herself fooled n'all,' said Ted. He went to the sink and filled the water jug. He set it down. 'Used to bug me. But now I think ... I don't know. What's the truth of anything, anyway? Nana says she'd never a cross word with Albert.

Seems like that to her and it makes her happy. Makes sense to her. You follow?

What really happened, it don't make a whole lot of difference, not to Nana.

The way she remembers it – now, that makes all t'difference in the world. You know? You know what I mean?'

'Yeah,' said Gabriel. 'Sort of.' His father looked him in the eye. This was, Gabe sensed, an opportunity. This speech, with its hesitations and uncertainties, its vague and – frankly – shaky idea, its appeal, finally, for understanding, was an opening. It was not the kind of speech his father usually made. The spotlight shone on Ted's bald head, the scalp tight and red.